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The purpose of this paper is to interrogate the “double-jeopardy” in widely adopted women’s leadership development interventions aimed at “fixing” women, explore critical feminist coaching (CFC) perspectives and practices and offer more equitable and just alternatives for developing women leaders.

This paper includes a literature review of post-feminist and critical feminist perspectives and a critical examination of coaching for women leaders from each perspective.

Postfeminist approaches in organizations are little scrutinized because of the dominant postfeminist discourse that women's subordination and oppression have been “resolved” through neoliberal, individualistic interventions, such as postfeminist coaching programs. Infusing the message of “fixing women” through emphasizing “4 C’s” – confidence, control, courage and competition – postfeminist coaching programs have been submitting women leaders to “double jeopardy.” The authors critique this postfeminist coaching paradox from a critical feminist perspective foregrounding “4 R’s” – reflecting, reforming, raising and rebuilding – promising more equitable, just development.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first attempt to describe CFC and presentation of a conceptual and practical model of the process. The authors define postfeminist coaching as the disavowal of feminist values and failure to challenge gender hegemony in the coaching process. The authors propose a model of CFC defined as the explicit embrace of feminist values and challenge of gender hegemony in the coaching process. The authors offer alternatives for developing women leaders amid paradoxical, complex, capitalist systems, with a critical lens challenging postfeminism.

The purpose of this paper is to empirically illustrate how human resource development (HRD) resists and omits issues of diversity in academic programs, textbooks, and research; analyze the research on HRD and diversity over a ten‐year period; discuss HRD's resistance to diversity; and offer some recommendations for a more authentic integration of diversity into HRD research, teaching, and practice.

The paper analyzes common HRD textbooks and refereed diversity research over a ten‐year period to examine the amount of HRD research is being conducted in the area of diversity.

The paper found that HRD overwhelmingly omits diversity topics, in contradiction to its claims of “diversity” as a legitimate part of the field. The paper concludes that HRD's omission of diversity is a form of resistance since fundamentally addressing diversity threatens HRD's performative frameworks and practices.

The paper has implications for scholars and practitioners who are interested in not only producing more robust diversity scholarship, but also improving practice. The paper challenges HRD researchers to more systematically examine diversity and practitioners to be more cautious consumers of diversity practices.

The paper is original in its premise that HRD resists diversity and in its illustration of how glaring omissions of diversity are in HRD scholarship.

The purpose of this article is to analyze the historical development of HRD knowledge. The analysis aims to use the qualitative research technique of text deconstruction on an important management text from the human relations phase of organization theory. Deconstruction is not a common method to HRD. In this paper, HRD scholars interested in how HRD knowledge and theories are created are given this tool to expose implicit assumptions.

The article uses text deconstruction, based on Bradshaw.

The deconstruction identified several beliefs that suggest that Roethlisberger was operating from a masculine epistemological perspective. Two clusters of findings emerged: one cluster revolved around the role of the researcher, and the other cluster revolved around the role of gender.

Postpositivist perspectives on knowledge generation and theory building in HRD are limited. Post‐structural analyses need to be considered.

The article exposes how a gendered history influenced HRD scholarship and practice, and provides suggestions for future scholarship and practice.

Legitimizes text deconstruction as an integral research tool for HRD.

The purpose of this paper is to review the literature on diversity training and examine the effect of power, privilege and politics on diversity in organisations.

This is a conceptual paper examining the arguments in favour and against diversity training in organisations. It identifies the presence of dominant groups in society leading to the marginalisation and oppression of minority diverse groups. It introduces the papers to the special issue under the three themes of: organisational impacts and outcomes; identify and self‐presentation and resistance to diversity.

The value of diversity training to promoting inclusivity, equality and fairness in organisations is underlined as is the importance of the human resource development community adopting a more proactive role in addressing the issue of diversity through research and course cirricula.

The paper introduces this special issue in “Diversity training in organisations” by examining the background concepts and providing an overview of the contributions to the issue.

Women are underrepresented in the leadership ranks across society. Research and the development of strategies to assist corporate women in breaking the glass ceiling is frequent and ongoing. Less prevalent has been a similar exploration of the barriers that women in academe confront in regards to their upward mobility and subsequent leadership. This article analyzes how academic women experience the glass ceiling, how research done on corporate women can inform much needed study of barriers to academic women’s upward mobility, and finally, how human resource development practices may benefit advancing women’s leadership in higher education.