Women, Learning, and Charitable Leadership in Canada

This thesis explores how female charitable-sector leaders draw on dominant discourses and how they counter them in their talk about leadership and learning. Drawing on rich narratives coming out of female leaders’ interviews, I demonstrate how gender and identities are constructed through dominant discourses drawing on feminist post-structuralism and intersectionality theory. This inquiry uses a transdisciplinary discursive approach combining Critical Discourse analysis (CDA), Feminist Post-structuralist Discourse Analysis (FPDA), and Discursive Psychology (DP). Drawing on these approaches ensures that gender remains at the forefront, that a connection occurs between societal discourses and day-to-day talk, and that the research attends to how subjectivities are created through talk. The intention is fourfold. First, this research aims for a greater understanding of how present masculine constructions of leadership are manifest in charitable organizational leaders’ talk. Second, it explores how such masculine leadership ideals are negotiated and challenged. It identifies how these discourses occur and create points of tension or ideological dilemmas. Third, it investigates moments where dominant discourses are contested in talk. Finally, this research considers how learning is implicated in these processes. The findings demonstrate, first, that women are positioned through dominant discourses of leadership, gender, and difference, and that this places them as something “other” than a leader. Dominant discourses, though they circulate broadly, penetrate the non-profit sector contextually. Second, the findings establish that charitable-sector leaders negotiate and challenge dominant discourses. Third, the findings demonstrate that women contest these notions through discursive mechanisms, including naming dominant discourses, using non-damaging discourses, and rediscursivization. The contestation of dominant discourses also occurs contextually and, sometimes, in contradictory ways and works to challenge the status quo. Fourth, learning is embedded in discourse resulting in women learning in and through dominant discourses as they lead. This research contributes to the understanding of how dominant masculine rationality is learned and perpetuated in leaders’ talk, as well as how it is challenged. This, in turn, provides new methodological tools and discursive approaches to research and the practice of social change work not only in the non-profit sector but also in leadership learning and social policy development.

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