Abstract
Women remain persistently underrepresented in senior leadership roles globally, despite substantial investment in leadership development initiatives. While prior research has focused largely on skills, competencies, and structural barriers, considerably less attention has been paid to how women come to see themselves—and be recognised by others—as leaders over time. This paper addresses this gap by examining the development of women’s leadership identity as a socially embedded and gendered process.
Drawing on leadership identity theory and the claiming–granting framework, we conceptualise leadership identity as a dynamic, relational construction shaped through interaction, feedback, and reflection. Building on identity-based perspectives of leadership development and responding to calls for more gender-sensitive theorising, we investigate how identity development unfolds for women within organisational contexts.
We report findings from a multi-stage qualitative study comprising 54 semi-structured interviews with women leaders across Australia and the Nordic countries. The study integrates three complementary samples: women participating in leadership development programs with mentoring, women in programs without mentoring, and senior women leaders who had not engaged in structured external development initiatives. Using an inductive Gioia methodology, we analysed participants’ narratives of career progression, leadership experiences, and developmental turning points.
Our analysis reveals a non-linear cycle of women’s leadership identity development characterised by three interrelated phases: emergence, erosion, and restoration. Early leadership identities often emerged through formative family, educational, or early career experiences that validated ambition and capability. As careers progressed, however, many women encountered experiences that eroded their leadership identity, including gender bias, stereotyping, exclusion from opportunities, and lack of recognition for leadership claims. These experiences frequently led to self-doubt, identity conflict, and withdrawal from leadership aspirations. Leadership identity restoration occurred through reflective and relational processes, most notably mentoring, which provided a psychologically safe space for reinterpreting experiences, reaffirming legitimacy, and reconstructing a sense of self-as-leader.
The paper makes four key theoretical contributions. First, it reconceptualises leadership identity development as cyclical and reparable rather than linear. Second, it reframes mentoring as an identity process rather than solely a developmental intervention. Third, it integrates gender explicitly into leadership identity theory, explaining differential granting of leadership. Finally, it extends the concept of identity workspaces by showing how mentoring enables leadership identity repair. Practical implications for leadership development and gender equity initiatives are discussed.