2018/07/30 by Meredith Nash, Robyn Moore · 1 voice
Psychology · Social Sciences · #Career Development and Diversity #Gender Diversity and Inequality #Mentoring and Academic Development
paper · doi:10.1080/09589236.2018.1504758
openalex publication_date 2018/07/30 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Women are under-represented in science, technology, engineering, mathematics and medicine (STEMM) fields worldwide, particularly in leadership positions. We explore this phenomenon by examining the leadership experiences of 25 women who were actively seeking to enhance their leadership capacities in STEMM fields from five countries in the Global North. We argue that women in this study seemed to be caught in an ‘ideological dilemma’ between recognizing sexism and gender bias in their organizational contexts and seeing their organizations as gender neutral. We argue that a post-feminist climate and a neoliberal ethic of meritocracy in science render inequality difficult to articulate and address. Considering this dilemma through the lens of ‘cruel optimism’, we suggest that women are problematically bound to a fantasy of success in STEMM in which leadership is attainable through arduous effort.Abbreviation: STEMM; Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics, and Medicine