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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.

Recent research on immersive experiences in online environments for higher education has attributed a fundamental role to two distinct yet connected psychological phenomena: the feelings of being virtually present in the education environment, often simply called presence, and peak episodes of flow. The authors conceptually delimitate these two psychological facets of e-learners’ experiences and examine their interplay. The authors show how flow episodes are elicited by students’ sense of control over the online education environment, their attention being focussed on the learning tasks, and their feelings of being physically placed in the online education setting. Also, the interactivity created by the online education environment evokes an e-learner’s imagery, which in turn triggers presence feelings and episodes of flow. The authors further show that, although presence and flow are triggered by some common antecedents, they differ in the object of the individual’s immersion, and that presence feelings facilitate flow. Moreover, the authors provide practical recommendations for higher education institutions, policy makers and the academic and information and communication technology community involved in e-learning, to make sure e-learner experiences reach their fullest potential.

In this paper, we examine the effects of legitimation and delegitimation of female leaders in male- and female-dominated organizations on leader behavior toward their subordinates. Drawing upon status and legitimacy theories, we argue that delegitimation represents one event that makes gender stereotypes salient in different organizational contexts, and by this means affects leader–subordinate interaction. Gender stereotypes will be more salient in male- than in female-dominated organizations, but only when female leaders are delegitimated. Specifically, we hypothesize that deauthorized female leaders will exhibit more deferential and less directive behavior than authorized female leaders, and this effect will be stronger in male- than in female-dominated organizations. Authorized female leaders, however, will express a similar amount of deferential and directive behavior, regardless of organizational sex composition. To test these hypotheses, we created a laboratory experiment with simulated organizations. Results are mixed. Deauthorized leaders are marginally more deferential than authorized leaders, and this effect is stronger in male-dominated organizations; authorized leaders express similar amounts of deferential behavior in both types of organizations. Yet, leaders are more directive in male- than in female-dominated organizations, whether they are deauthorized or authorized. We discuss the implications of these results and future directions for this research.

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.