Black Women in Leadership – Dominant Discourses that Construct, Maintain and Legitimize Gender, Race Class Bias in Top Canadian Corporations
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Decades after the establishment of the feminist movement in Canada, systemic gender biases proliferate in corporate boardrooms. Notwithstanding the influx of women into the paid Canadian workforce, gender inequality, specifically the disproportion of women in executive roles in Canadian corporations, is confounding. This study examines dominant androcentric and Eurocentric discourses about gender, race, and class that influence how society identifies and ascribes masculinity to leadership roles. Dominant discourses construct, maintain, and legitimize biases that impede women's career progression to senior leadership. Discourses in media, for example, television, movies, print and other narratives, influence how society behaves and treats women leaders in male-dominated roles as President, CEO, CFO, Chairs and other named officers in Canadian Financial Post 500 companies. The theoretical framework incorporates three theories in deconstructing androcentric leadership discourses and biases. First, the research interrogates the motivation for the division and deskilling of labour using Harry Braverman's Labour Process Management theory, an extension of Karl Marx's class theory, to examine the history of hegemony, capitalism, and patriarchal settings. Next, Gender Theory analyzes social, structural and institutional barriers women leaders experience as they disrupt the traditional roles women have and are expected to play in society. Subjective androcentric discourses relating to femininity, such as work-life balance, care-giving, child-bearing, and tropes like the 'superwoman syndrome,' are reviewed. Finally, Black Feminism interrogates tacit and implicit biases that perpetuate the disenfranchisement of Black females as Presidents, CEO's, or Chairs of corporate boards in FP 500 companies. The Conceptual Framework looks at fundamental Leadership Theories to examine the evolution of leadership and characteristics that historically are associated with masculinity. The research employs a qualitative research methodology using content analysis and critical discourse analysis incorporating books, journals, documentaries, public interviews and other writings on gender, race and class hegemonies. These allow for a critical examination of the androcentric and patriarchal ideologies rooted within capitalistic systems. Such androcentric ideologies impact compensation, career progression and career longevity for women in leadership, particularly Black and racialized women. The findings recommend a critical pedagogy and call for a profound commitment by all stakeholders to reify change.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.033 | 0.015 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".