Claire Wright reviews Catherine Fox’s Breaking the Boss Bias: How to get more women into leadership. NewSouth, 2024.
In Breaking the Boss Bias, Catherine Fox sounds the alarm about women in leadership. Beyond the glowing headlines about the number of women on top company boards, the reality is that most women will not reach top leadership positions. For the small number that do, they will face bias, backlash, sexism and misogyny, while being told that the situation is not really that bad. Fox begins with a discussion of the gender-based stereotypes women face, examines male backlash to women’s progress, the gendered legacies of traditional leadership education, and women’s everyday experiences of misogyny. Chapter 6 then examines the women who have been able to disrupt gender bias to ‘lead differently’, with chapter 7 providing advice to readers based on the approach of successful women.
The book is intended to illuminate the gender bias that exists in leadership, and ‘skewer’ (pp.53-54) those who argue against appointing women to leadership positions. As a journalist, Fox relies primarily on media sources, industry reports, and data from government and international organisations. Although Fox claims to have “trawled the research, interviewed the experts” (p.6), integration of academic research consists of interviews with select academics, and discussion of the occasional article from The Conversation. In fact, chapter 4 handily dismisses business leadership research on the basis that it has had a lukewarm response to analysing gender – a claim that was certainly true 20 years ago, but in the intervening decades has more than been rectified by integration with insights from feminist and gender studies disciplines.
I agree with much of the material in this book. Fox’s discussion of the barriers to women’s equality is comprehensive, and sections on gendered occupational segregation, and the unequal division of household and caring labour in most heterosexual partnerships identifies the long-term structural barriers that continue to govern women’s work, life and family choices. Fox also correctly identifies the limits of existing company policies, criticising superficial interventions such as International Women’s Day (groan), backlash from male colleagues, stereotypes that render women as sub-optimal leaders, and ‘advice’ that seeks to fix women rather than patriarchal attitudes. Fox’s incorporation of intersectionality is also very welcome, with discussion of additional barriers faced by women based on their ethnicity, sexuality, age, or non-cis/non-binary gender.
At the same time, the lack of internal consistency means I cannot connect with the book as a whole. Specifically, Fox is both critical of gender stereotyping, and uses the ‘business case’ to advocate for women in leadership. Under the well-meaning, though equally gendered, assumption that men in leadership will respond to a profit-based rationale for women’s appointments, the business case argues that women possess inherent characteristics that can be deployed to improve corporate profitability, sustainability, governance and stakeholder relations. Fox argues that women in leadership are good for businesses, via “return on investment, and bottom-line impact, plus better innovation, governance and less risk exposure” (p.31). Women in leadership, it seems, are also mothers, and thus have transferable skills in adaptation, collaboration, communication, creativity, emotional regulation, and running household and grocery budgets (pp.36-7, 53). Women in leadership are argued to be good for the economy, are the single biggest lever to generate wealth, and have the potential to add about “$128 billion per year to the Australian economy” (pp.5, 66). Women in leadership are also good for the world, contributing to “less conflict”, “more focus on the wellbeing of the population” and can contribute to policies that ensure equality for all (pp.3, 12, 31-2).
While I am resigned to the fact that the ‘business case’ is the orthodox method of advocating for women in leadership, it traps writers such as Fox in an ontological nightmare. On the one hand, feminine stereotypes such as vulnerability, authenticity and motherhood are positioned as a method by which patriarchal capitalism penalises women in the workplace. On the other, femininity is positioned as the source of women’s liberation, with women appointed to leadership positions due to their inherent ability to ‘nurture and civilise’ corporate management. The result is a series of frustrating contradictions, with Fox arguing that women in leadership improve gender equality throughout the organisation (p.139). Fox then argues that this “doesn’t imply all women are supportive or indeed behave nicely to each other all the time. They don’t. They’re human, and just as flawed as the next man” (p.140). In another instance, Fox is critical of stereotypes that assign women less aggressive and risky leadership characteristics, which limits women’s access to venture capital, and contributes to ‘glass cliff’ appointments in times of upheaval (pp.51, 57). She then uses stereotypes to advocate for women’s skill in this area, arguing they women are “less risky” (p.51, see also p.31), and are “better at bringing the team together and tidying up the mess” (p.57). Although Fox was presented with several thoughtful perspectives on gendered behaviour from her sources – notably Professor Michelle Ryan’s discussion of “Who gets to be authentic? And whose responsibility is it to be authentic?” (p.108) – these were not internalised in the rest of the book.
The inconsistency with which Fox sees gender, and stereotyping, means that Fox provides very few remedies to ‘break the boss bias’. The messy tangle of what constitutes a problematic stereotype for women in leadership versus a helpful stereotype that can be used to advocate for their appointments, means that genuinely actionable solutions elude the author. The business case implies that women should ‘lean in’ to their feminine niche in the corporate labour market, even though they will also be penalised for it. If women refuse to do so, they are then to blame for their lack of progress, as they failed to add to the corporate bottom line. As such, Fox’s proposed interventions are vague, including “investing where it counts: less mentoring, remedial workshops and unconscious bias training; and more gender pay gap audits, transparency of progression criteria and feedback, and vetting for sexism/bias in recruitment and performance management” (pp.30-31). Fox also argues that the solution includes “facing up to how bias and backlash operate […] replacing traditional ideas about who makes effective leaders […] taking seriously and preventing micro-aggressions, removing bias in systems; elevating women’s skill as decision-makers” (p.211). Less clear is how to do so in a way that frees women and men from the gendered straightjackets that bind them, and makes corporations more equal for all. One day, I hope, we won’t need a ‘business case’, and women’s humanity will be enough for them to have a right to a place in every corner of society, including leadership.
Claire E. F. Wright
University of Technology Sydney
