Women and leadership in investment management: exploring organizational and cultural barriers and boundaries

Abstract

Purpose – Set within the investment management sector in Ireland, this paper aims to examine the cultural and organizational barriers faced by women. We identify social closure theory along with Bourdieu’s “field” and “habitus” constructs and his non-material forms of capital ideology as a collective lens from which to understand women’s “otherness”. Design/methodology/approach – An interpretivist philosophical stance underpins the research. Using a snowball sampling technique, nineteen semi-structured interviews were undertaken with sixteen women and three men, all of whom work, or had worked, within the Irish investment management sector. Findings – A complex mix of cultural and organizational barriers prevents women attaining cultural, social and symbolic capital and “fitting in”. Gendered cultural expectations are pervasive and exclude women from senior roles. The acquisition of capital is deeply reliant on organizational context and is unavailable to women in the same way as men. The boys’ club, presenteeism, performance ethos and workplace structures and practices together act as boundary drawing tactics to exclude women and reinforce how capital in the sector is used as a mechanism for maintaining men’s privilege and positioning women as “other”. Originality/value – Highlighting how closure regimes in investment management both emerge and persist provides essential insights into how gender regimes are maintained. By placing attention not on the individual, but rather on the “field” and “habitus” with its inherent norms and structures, we reveal the implicit and explicit challenges women face. Emphasizing these issues has important implications in prohibiting the perpetration of heteronormative assumptions about women as leaders