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The purpose of this paper is to explore the most common general metaphors for women’s leadership: the glass ceiling, sticky floor and the labyrinth. The authors discuss the strengths and weaknesses of these metaphors for characterizing women’s current situation as leaders.

In addition to reviewing the literature on the status of women leaders, the authors also discuss recent research on the power of metaphor to illustrate concepts and influence social judgments.

The authors conclude that the labyrinth is the most useful metaphor for women leaders, because although there has been slow steady improvement in women’s access to leadership, women continue to face challenges that men do not face: gender stereotypes that depict women as unsuited to leadership, discrimination in pay and promotion, lack of access to powerful mentors and networks and greater responsibility for childcare and other domestic responsibilities.

Although the glass ceiling metaphor implies that women face obstacles once they have risen to very high levels of leadership and the sticky floor metaphor implies that women are prevented from any advancement beyond entry level, the labyrinth reflects the myriad obstacles that women face throughout their careers.

The labyrinth metaphor not only acknowledges these challenges but also suggests that women can advance to very high levels of leadership.

This paper aims to review the existing literature on the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on gender and work roles to determine whether the pandemic has undermined the status, pay and advancement of women or has provided opportunities for reducing gender inequality.

The author reviewed the literature on the effects of COVID-19 and past pandemics on gender equality, focusing on job loss, the effects of being in essential occupations on health and well-being, the increased domestic responsibilities of women and men due to closure of schools and other social services and the effects of telecommuting on gender roles.

The pandemic has generally created challenges for women’s advancement. More women than men have lost their jobs; more women than men are in essential jobs that expose them to infection and psychological stress, and women have had more work disruption than men have had because of increases in childcare and other responsibilities. On the other hand, telecommuting has increased men’s amount of childcare, and this does have the potential to increase men’s childcare responsibilities in the long term, thereby reducing the gender gap in domestic responsibilities and increasing gender equality.

The COVID-19 pandemic is still ongoing and the research on the pandemic’s effects are new and ongoing.

To the best of the author’s knowledge, this is the first scholarly review of the literature on the potential effects of COVID-19 on the gender gap in pay and advancement.

Perceived compatibility between requirements of managerial work and attributes of women is believed important to the advancement and success of women, and research demonstrates continued ambivalence about women executives. The question of how images of women executives are disseminated, reproducing or contesting negative characterizations, has received little attention. The research reported here focuses on US business press as a cultural carrier disseminating images of women executives. Critical discourse analysis examined 27 front page Wall Street Journal accounts of 22 women executives in the year following Carly Fiorina’s appointment to head Hewlett‐Packard; 20 front page accounts of 24 men executives were used as comparison. Prominently featured articles on women executives provide fractured images of women as executives: while some accounts are positive, other portrayals reinforce negative perceptions of women’s competence and likeability as executives and concerns about the social order. Similar issues are not raised in coverage of male executives. Author gender does not seem to affect the portrayal.

Workplace bullying involves a power imbalance, and despite laws in New Zealand which prohibit discrimination on the grounds of gender, women remain under-represented in top-level roles. The aim of the study was to examine whether gender and role (managerial/non-managerial) were related to the bullying experienced by women and men.

An online survey collected data from 991 (41%) men and 1,421 (59%) women. The survey provided a definition of bullying and asked participants whether they had been bullied at work. If they replied yes, then follow-up questions asked for the gender and role of the perpetrator.

Women were more likely than men to self-identify as having been bullied. Male employers, senior managers, middle managers, supervisor and peers bullied men and women about equally, whereas women bullied women far more than they bullied men. The largest group of bullies of women were female peers, who rarely bullied male peers, while male peers bullied both genders about equally. Female clients bullied female staff but almost never male staff; male clients bullied both men and women but the numbers were small.

These data relied on self-report, and people may be reluctant to identify themselves as targets or may not recognize that the negative behaviours they have been facing amount to bullying. Qualitative data can help explore these issues from societal, organizational and policy perspectives.

While men and women may differ in how often they recognize or admit to having been bullied, the gendered nature of power in the workplace is well established and reinforced in the findings here. It is clear that organizational leaders, both male and female, need to understand gender and power imbalance and act as role models. Currently, the authors’ findings show that the behaviour of at least some of those at the top of New Zealand organizations needs to improve.

The problem of bullying at work will not be easy to solve. The solutions lie, not with “fixing” individuals via training, stress management and well-being programmes but with effective systems, procedures, policies and leadership that recognize the power dynamics at work.

Little is known at present about the relationships between gender and bullying behaviour. The paper focusses on who bullies whom in the workplace and finds that men tend to bully both men and women while women tend to bully women. Importantly, the authors’ works suggest that instead of structural and organizational measures to manage bullying, greater initiatives to manage bullying need to consider how gender and power dynamics interact at work.

This phenomenological study, conducted within the discourse on the underrepresentation of women in academia, examined the factors influencing the advancement of women academics in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM).

The sample comprised twenty-one women academics from both public and private universities in Peru. Data were collected through in-depth interviews based on the women's experiences and subsequently processed using Moustakas’ (1994) stages for encoding, categorization, and analysis.

The study introduces a conceptual framework of nine factors – personal tastes and preferences, attitudes towards science as a vocation, care work, work–life balance, congruent gender roles, occupational segregation, lack of opportunities, low salaries, and lack of gender equality policies – that impact the career progression of women in STEM fields.

The results offer valuable insights for policymakers and academic authorities to address the barriers affecting women academics in STEM. The uniqueness of this paper lies in its investigation in Peru, a country with the highest female labor force participation in Latin America, where women constitute the majority of undergraduate program graduates.

The following classified, annotated list of titles is intended to provide reference librarians with a current checklist of new reference books, and is designed to supplement the RSR review column, “Recent Reference Books,” by Frances Neel Cheney. “Reference Books in Print” includes all additional books received prior to the inclusion deadline established for this issue. Appearance in this column does not preclude a later review in RSR. Publishers are urged to send a copy of all new reference books directly to RSR as soon as published, for immediate listing in “Reference Books in Print.” Reference books with imprints older than two years will not be included (with the exception of current reprints or older books newly acquired for distribution by another publisher). The column shall also occasionally include library science or other library related publications of other than a reference character.

The theoretical and practical criticality of self‐talk for leader success receives extensive multidisciplinary discussion, without a great deal of empirical research given the challenge of assessing actual self‐talk. The purpose of this paper is to advance research and theory on self‐leadership by examining leader self‐talk and its relationship to effectiveness and strain.

In total, 189 senior executives' self‐addressed, future‐oriented letters were collected. The executives wrote these letters to themselves for their own personal development; thus, the language used represented a form of naturally occurring self‐talk. Two types of self‐talk were coded: constructive and dysfunctional. Supervisor and direct report ratings of leadership of others and creativity and self‐ratings of job strain were collected.

Extensive variability among leaders in constructive self‐talk was found. Exemplars of constructive and dysfunctional self‐talk are presented. Constructive self‐talk positively related to effective leadership of others and creativity/originality as evaluated by subordinates and superiors and was negatively related to job strain. Dysfunctional self‐talk related negatively to creativity/originality.

In addition to illustrating the types of self‐talk used by leaders, research is extended by providing some of the first empirical evidence of how leaders' free‐flowing thoughts are related to their effectiveness and their overall well‐being, lending direct support to a principal proposition from the self‐leadership framework.

The purpose of this paper is to conceptually and empirically explore issues that explain why women entrepreneurs access only a small percentage of venture capital (VC) investment in the USA.

The focus is on the situations women entrepreneurs face, and the strategies they adopt, to successfully fund their high‐growth businesses with venture funding. Rather than looking for answers at the individual level (men v women), the authors focus on the construct of gender and the way that the socially constructed business practices and processes of access to capital may appear neutral and natural but, in fact, may deliver differential consequences to women and men. When entrepreneurs and capital providers are interacting around the terms and particulars of a business venture, they are also participating in a less obvious conversation – an interaction that is call the Shadow Negotiation. Through interviews with women who have been successful or are in the process of accessing VC for their businesses, patterns of women's awareness and strategic responses that illustrate this phenomenon are identified and their implications discussed.

Women are actors with agency, taking control over situations that may be stacked against them. The analysis suggests that women entrepreneurs vary in the degree to which they identify the gendered landscape they are navigating, and the level of attention and care that management of this landscape demands.

This study complements existing research, both theoretically and prescriptively.