Today is a very exciting day! It’s publication day for my article in Gender, Work & Organisation entitled “Bossyboots”: Postfeminism and the construction of Australia’s ‘Corporate Woman’. You can find it open access (with thanks to UTS) here.
Women in leadership are often styled as girlbosses. The girl boss is typified by Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In and Sophia Amoruso’s 2014 #girlboss, with empowerment equated with financial success, market competition, and a curated personal and professional ‘brand’. Success is attributed to individual tenacity, with a distinctive, feminine-corporate persona that carefully balances between ‘natural’ femininity and the traditionally masculine corporate world they occupy. Femininity is seen as not only immutable, but the source of their contribution to corporate leadership through collaboration, stakeholder relationship, and ethical conduct. Girlbossing essentially takes the rhetoric of empowerment and deploys it in the service of oppression, encouraging women to “lean in” without addressing underlying or intersectional disadvantage.
Before the girlboss was girlbossing, we had postfeminism. The 1980s and 1990s saw the split of the Women’s Movement between mainstream groups focussed on labour politics and union organising, and liberal groups focussing on issues important to middle class white women. Feminism evolved, in part, from a struggle towards downward redistribution into a marriage with neoliberalism, focussing on individualism, autonomy, self-surveillance, choice, consumerism and personal achievement, alongside an interest in ‘natural’ sex-based differences and the presumption that gender equality has been achieved. A class- and race-blind emphasis on ‘girl power’, or the idea that women can do anything now, sat uneasily against the realities of women’s experiences at the end of the twentieth century, with intense scrutiny of women, a persistent gender-pay gap, and segregated labour market. See: the Spice Girls, Sex and the City, Bridget Jones.
The girl bosses are girl bossing
This marriage between feminism and neoliberalism has shaped the material experiences of, and interventions for, Australian women in corporate leadership. Contemporary women in leadership are expected to calibrate between stereotypically ‘male’ leadership characteristics, as well as their inherent ‘feminine’ nature. Individualism, and the accompanying choice architecture, has encouraged women to optimise themselves rather than interrogate the structural inequalities of the organisation. An emphasis on choice has obscured the politics of choice or structures that govern the choices available to women. The ‘business case’ – which aligns femininity and an interest in natural sex-based differences with economic progress – has positioned remaining marginalisation as an individual lack of value. Although postfeminism is responsible for the success of interventions to improve the representation of women in corporate leadership, it is also responsible for the movement’s current challenges – including a narrow demographic profile, a lack of women in key portfolios, and a gender pay gap that exceeds the general workforce (see my other posts on this here, here and here).
Understanding postfeminism is thus necessary for us to uncover the basis of current policies to improve the number of women in corporate leadership, and provide insight into the movement’s current challenges. To this end, I analysed the Australian Financial Review‘s ‘Corporate Woman’ column, published regularly between 1988 and 1998. The column was intended to capitalise on the growing number of professional and managerial women, and was the only mainstream Australian periodical that consistently documented women’s progress up the corporate ladder. It presents a unique opportunity to understand the everyday production of Australian postfeminism, as it was sold to professional and elite women, at the moment it embarked on this key project.
I found that Australian postfeminism was shaped, in part, by transnational forces. The 1980s and 1990s were “best of times and the worst of times” for Australian women (Dixson, 1999 [1976]: 5). As with their participation in the Women’s Movement, Australia also actively participated in the reproduction of neoliberalism in the 1980s, with the Labor Hawke-Keating government (1983-1996) mirroring the US Reagan and UK Thatcher administrations in their emphasis on deregulation and austerity. Buoyed by the narrowing of the gender pay gap, the advancement of professional women, and the mainstreaming of feminist issues, many postfeminists thought the job was done. However, the gender pay gap persisted, and the labour market remained heavily segregated, with most women working in community or business services, retail, or clerical roles. ‘Corporate Woman’ shared many of these transnational features, with the appointment of women to leadership positions, even in small numbers, seen as evidence that barriers to women’s promotion had been removed. At the same time, the postfeminist revival in interest in ‘natural’ sex-based differences portrayed women as ill-suited to management roles, with women advised to work in areas that aligned with their natural femininity. Although the column identified structural barriers to women’s career progression, solutions were found through individual achievement and personal optimisation such as education, mentorship schemes, and confidence building workshops. The column was thus uneasy in its reporting, discussing structural challenges and women’s collective characteristics, alongside the assumption that gender equality had been achieved, and that any remaining inequalities were the result of women’s natural differences and/or autonomous choices.
Women in corporate leadership were also susceptible to exclusionary Australian national identities, specifically the revival of Australian egalitarianism. Influencing everything from government, clothing and language, Australia has long seen itself as the land of the ‘fair go’. Egalitarianism was the foundation of the ‘larrikin’, or the cultural image of an unconventional, anti-authoritarian and likeable male figure, with nationalist figures such as Ned Kelly and Crocodile Dundee invoking the perseverance of the working class, anti-authoritarian hero. Australian egalitarianism was revived in the 1980s and 1990s through the neoliberal politics of the Hawke-Keating Labor governments, and the resulting focus on deregulation, freedom and personal achievement. Women in corporate leadership were subject to similar expectations, including a preference for individual achievement, opposition to collective interventions, and criticism of radical feminists for compromising women’s positions won on merit.
The Aussie larrikin
Reflecting the preference, particularly amongst Western countries in the twentieth century, for atomised ‘nuclear family’ units, ‘Corporate Woman’ focussed on childcare as the solution to women’s career progression. In the wake of second wave feminism, women’s mass entry to the formal workforce did not absolve them of domestic responsibilities; nor were men free from breadwinning (See Black 2022). Instead, postfeminism saw the binaries of the feminist and the housewife, the career woman and the homemaker, and the public and private spheres, destabilise. While some women embraced ‘new traditionalism’, working women were positioned as postfeminist subjects in ‘Corporate Woman’ through their ‘choice’ of the career-family juggle (they can ‘have it all!’) (see also, Samuelsson 2024).
Liz Lemon thinks she can ‘have it all’
Differing from the career-family juggle of working women, corporate women in the 1990s were advised to adopt a masculine persona in their family planning. The work demands of elite corporate women, it was argued, required them to choose the ‘career primary’ path where they would sacrifice their home and social life for the benefit of the company. The expectation that women in corporate leadership behave ‘like a man’ at work was seen as incompatible with family life, with it ‘unfair’ for mothers to inflict the demands of a corporate career on their children. At the same time, men were also exonerated from reproductive work, with little suggestion that corporate mem faced a similar dilemma, or that fathers could successfully perform the bulk of domestic and caring labour.
Finally, women’s empowerment was integration with the needs of the 1990s Australian economy. The 1990s was an interesting time in Australia’s economic history. Structural adjustment, which began in the 1960s, halved the share of GDP in manufacturing, with a corresponding increase in the share of GDP in services. Neoliberalism emphasised deregulation and the removal of trade protections, exposing Australia to new global markets. Combined with concerns over skills shortages and falling birth rates, increased concentration of Australians’ work in tertiary service industries precipitated targeted immigration with stringent skills and education criteria. The decade also began with a deep recession, with the outrageous antics of the greedy, risky and corrupt ‘corporate raiders’ catalysed by the October 1987 global stock market crash. In November 1990, Treasurer Paul Keating announced the ‘recession that Australia had to have’. In response, the column argued that the appointment of women to leadership positions was necessary for companies and the economy to thrive, via women’s assumed capabilities in negotiation, stakeholder management, fairness, and collaboration. Although postfeminist women were told they could – and indeed should – be everywhere, they were also confined by expectations of their femininity, with the business case assigning them to emotional or ‘communal’ labour rather than ‘masculine’ management roles. Women were thus simultaneously applauded and disparaged for their femininity, and were forced to walk a fine line between assumptions of their natural abilities alongside meeting masculine standards of success.
This uncovers the cultural maps that have guided research, policy interventions, and women’s lived experiences in corporate leadership roles. Australian postfeminism, in this early phase, had a long “afterlife”, with interventions for, and women’s experiences in, leadership roles reflecting individualism, choice, personal optimisation, market success, and an interest in sex-based differences. Rather than only a matter for the past, the institutionalisation of postfeminist ideas in the 1990s has influenced women entering corporate leadership over subsequent decades. As such, I argue that contemporary intersectional issues, pay inequality, and barriers to comparable levels of influence across the leadership suite have much to do with the postfeminist basis on which they were designed. My hope is that by illuminating this, we can help reshape them with a focus on justice and equality for all.