Breaking the Pattern: Women leading Social
Movement Organizations in the
Netherlands
Women as agents of change
Lili van Lith
Master thesis Sociology
Track: Gender, Sexuality & Society
Supervised by: Sarah Bracke & Esther Miedema
Amsterdam
Student number: 10153314
Date: 10-07-2017
Table of Contents
Acknowledgements ... 3
Abstract
... 4Foreword ... 5
1- Introduction: Breaking the Pattern ... 6
2- Problem Statement & Research Questions ... 9
3- Gender & Movements ... 10
Introduction ... 10
3.1 Political & Institutional Context ... 10
3.2 Gendered Mobilizing Structures ... 12
3.3 Gender & Leadership in Social Movements ... 12
Conclusion ... 15
4- Gender & Leadership ... 16
Introduction ... 16
4.1 Explanatory Metaphors ... 16
4.2 Theories on Female Leadership Styles ... 19
Conclusion ... 21
5- Research Design ... 22
Research Method ... 22
Sampling & Research Population ... 23
Analytical Strategy ... 23
Ethical Considerations ... 24
Findings ... 25
6- What Motivates Women in the Netherlands to Work in SMOs? ... 24
Introduction ... 24
6.1 The Good Cause ... 24
6.2 The Organizational Work Environment ... 29
6.3 The Role of Womanhood in Doing Good ... 32
6.4 Gender Roles & Stereotyping ... 33
Conclusion ... 36
7- How Do Female Leaders in SMOs in the Netherlands Understand Leadership? ... 37
Introduction ... 37
7.1 Explaining Female Career Mobility Challenges ... 37
7.2 Explaining Why Career Mobility Barriers Are Less Prevalent in the SMO Sector ... 39
7.3 What Is So Unique about Leadership in an SMO? ... 41
7.4 The Role of Masculinity and Femininity in Leadership Style ... 42
Conclusion ... 44
8- Striving for Diversity & Resisting Division ... 45
Introduction ... 45
Challenging Polarity ... 45
Conclusion ... 47
9- Conclusion & Discussion ... 48
Bibliography ... 50
Acknowledgements
A reminder that this work is never done in isolation. I would like to gratefully acknowledge a number of people, who’s words and wisdom have made this research possible. First, I would like to thank my supervisor Sarah Bracke for her guidance, support, and efforts to lift this thesis to greater heights. Second, I would like to express appreciation to all the female leaders and activists that made time for me in their overfull agendas, and who were enormously open-hearted in expressing their personal stories to me. Third, I would like to thank my mother Laurina, who’s mission to pursue women’s empowerment inspired me to write this thesis. Finally, I would like to extend my gratitude to my friends and my lover Tom, who’s support encouraged me during the span of this thesis.
Abstract
Although the role of women in social movements has been acknowledged, little is known about the sources of motivation behind their activism. Moreover, women seem particularly attracted to working in social movement organizations (SMOs), the formal variant of social movements. Women’s employment in SMOs is characterized by a high level of female leadership. This suggests that women in SMOs have managed to pursue a kind of career mobility that is more rare in other sectors in the labour market. Not much empirical research exists on why this is the case. This study endeavours to contribute to a better understanding why, and notably through relating women’s motivations to work in SMOs to their understandings of leadership. Two main reasons arise: first, women’s explanations for leadership barriers prevailing in other sectors almost completely coincide with their opinion on differences between these sectors and SMOs. These differences largely form the motivators that lead women to prefer working in SMOs over other, often more corporate sectors: the male-dominated, competitive, sexist, macho, profit driven atmosphere of corporates contrast the lack hereof and the ubiquity of a free, non-hierarchical, solidary, and female-friendly work environment of SMOs. Second, the transformational leadership style which appropriates SMOs coincides with the leadership style these women adhere to. In general, this comes down to an emphasis on relational and emotional qualities such as teamwork, fostering intimate contact, supporting others, coaching, expressing appreciation.
A general question that is addressed in this thesis is how women’s remarkable role in social movements relates to their critical role as female leaders in SMOs. Two themes emerged. First, their transgression of gender rules and the breaking of barriers. By participating in social movements, women disrupt the restrictions of the private, domestic sphere and are taken into the public and political realm. As female leaders in SMOs, women break through particular barriers that keep women from the top of the corporate and political sector, which is still defined as male. This implies that women in social movements and SMOs, fighting for issues are almost always also implicitly fighting for gender issues and challenging social relations of power, transgressing notions public and private spheres in the former and hegemonic male domination in the latter. A second common theme is the mission that women in social movements and SMOs pursue. I argue that the mission related motivators that drive women to become involved in social movements are the same motivators that drive women to commit their working lives to SMOs. In sum, feelings of empathy, anger, emotional attachment, an ethic of care, and a sense of hope drive women to devote themselves to activist missions related to the pursuit of a righteous and interconnected world. As such, a parallel can be made between this work and the work of many women in social movements.
Foreword
I have always felt attracted towards doing good and I am aware of the driving mechanisms that send me in this direction. The pursuit of social justice and environmental sustainability plays an ever-increasing role in my life. In the process of determining my stance towards this mission, I have encountered many inspiring women, both in the NGO world and in activist movements. My fascination with their prominent role in these movements sparked the emergence of this thesis.
Thanks to my courageous and feminist mother, I grew up with the idea of women's strength. Moreover, the post-feminist idea that I am responsible for my own future and happiness permeated my upbringing. That is to say, the believe in self-empowerment has been a substantial part of my life. Since I can remember, I have been interested in women’s emancipation and an awareness of the omnipresence of women’s structural disadvantages has marked by being. I have been formed by the feelings of outrage and incomprehension that arise from this understanding: if everyone can break through sexual barriers by empowering themselves, why does inequality still exist?
Studying sociology made me aware of the structural causes of inequality and exclusion in society. While I used to be aware of inequality but believed in individual strategies to bridge this inequality, I am now more aware of the far-reaching implications of the mechanisms of power that penetrate our society. This tension has inspired me to write this thesis: how do we, and women in particular, break pervasive patterns of structural inequality and injustice?
1. Introduction: Breaking the Pattern
“Your silence will not protect you.”Audre Lorde
(1984, p. 31, cited in Lorde, 1977)
Women have an extensive history of leadership in social movements. Whether as movement members, heads of organizations, political representatives, or grassroots activists, women from all over the world have not been reluctant to step forward and take a stance in support of various rights (Trigg & Bernstein, 2016). Historically, women have been on the forefront of emerging grassroots groups, social movements, and local political organizations engaged in environmental, socioeconomic, and political struggles (Merchant 1992, Seager 1993; Hynes 1992, as cited in Rocheleau, Thomas-Slayter, & Wangari, 2013). From the beginning of the Eighteenth century, women have been mobilizing as women to challenge multiple problems that reproduce systematic inequalities of class, status, and power (Ferree & Mueller, 2004). The organizations women have created and the movements and protests women have led to confront these structures of domination have had a massive impact on societies all over the world and continue to do so. This thesis contemplates the ways in which gender plays a role in social movements and explores the role of female leadership in organizations for social change.
For the purpose of this thesis, the term 'social movement' is defined as a type of group action. A social movement is a large grouping of individuals which focuses on political, environmental or social issues (Diani, 1992). That is to say: they carry out, resist, or undo social change (Harper, 1993). Many feminists define social change as moving towards “a society that would develop individuality but shift the balance from individual rights towards the rights of the majority and the collective, and that would validate the pursuit of the common good rather than individual self-interest” (Adamson, Briskin, & McPhail, 1988, p.101). Social change contains changes in nature, social institutions, social behaviours, or social relations. Maguire sees social change as “the long-haul struggle to create a world in which the full range of human characteristics, resources, experiences, and dreams are available to all our children” (Maguire, 2001, as cited in Reid, 2004). Social movements manifest themselves, in part, through a wide range of organizations, which have movement-like processes within themselves (Davis & Zald, 2005). These are called social movement organizations (SMOs). The term 'social movement organization' is employed to signify a formal organization engaged in actions to advance goals of social change.
Contemporary examples of these SMOs are PETA, Oxfam, Greenpeace, Novib, Unicef, and Amnesty. In regards to the empirical part of this thesis, I use the term NGO interchangeably with social movement organization, or SMO: as both non-state, nonprofit, activist, charitable associations that advocate for specific groups or issues, NGOs are a typical example of SMOs.
There is a growing body of research that points out the large proportion of female leadership positions1 in SMOs, which is in stark contrast with the marginal proportion of female leadership positions
in politics and commercial businesses (Hunt, 2007). A recent World Economic Forum report covering a hundred and fifteen countries, announces that women have converged only fifteen percent of the gender gap with regards to political emancipation at the highest levels (Hunt, 2007). At the same time, women have jointly been attracted to NGOs, where they have found fewer barriers to leadership. In NGOs, women are consistently overrepresented at top levels (Hunt, 2007). In the US, women lead many of the country's greatest philanthropic organizations. Most other countries pursue a comparable pattern. A group of journalists in Kyrgyzstan found that women lead 90 percent of NGOs but occupy not a single seat in parliament. Similarly, in South Korea, women head around 8o percent of the country's NGOs but head less than fourteen percent of the seats in the National Assembly. In Africa, the story is no different: “African women, who traditionally do the hard work of cultivation and all of the family rearing, also nurture NGOs and motivate civic initiatives. But they are widely expected to leave politics to men.” (Hunt, 2007, p. 109). This raises a question about the current situation in the Netherlands, where the empirical part of this thesis is performed. Although the number of women in leadership positions increases in the Netherlands, women remain under-represented in the upper layer of the Dutch business community. Only 10 percent of managers in the Netherlands at the highest professional level is female (Portegijs & van den Brakel, 2016). The emancipator monitor (2016) advises women who want to maximize their chances to reach the absolute top to work in the NGO sector, where thirty percent of the top positions are occupied by women. The imbalance in the share of female leaders in the Dutch business sector when compared to NGO community confirms the global trend. This thesis is about exploring why this imbalance prevails. I have chosen to conduct the current research in the Netherlands because this country forms an interesting case concerning women’s emancipation in the professional realm. There are a number of spheres where emancipation indicators are very high, but the sphere of the labour market seems to fall outside of this trend. Though the Netherlands has high indicators for gender equality relating to education, violence and reproductive rights, these indicators do not apply to the labour market: less than 10 percent of women are employed full-time (Bosch & Euwals, 2008). Because of this, the gender pay gap is among the highest in Europe. Dutch women could be considered progressive when compared with most other women in the world, but conflictingly, they are often responsible for only a small portion of the family income (Portegijs & Keuzenkamp, 2008). Strikingly, it appears that women like it this way. Less than 4 percent of women wish they had more working hours or increased responsibility in the workplace, even if they don’t have any children. "We look at the world of management—and it is a men's world—and we think, oh I could do that if I wanted," states Maaike van Lunberg, a redactor at De Stentor newspaper. "But I'd rather enjoy my life." Vossestein's book ‘Dealing
with the Dutch’ confirms that sentiment (Jessica Olien, 2010). He claims that women in the Netherlands
approach the hierarchical work environment with scepticism and do not commonly envy those who climb
1
In the context of this thesis, leadership positions refer to those leading the entire organization or a department
within the organization. The function includes tasks such as planning, coordinating and giving direction to and evaluating activities within an organization (van den Brakel, 2016).
its ranks (The Economist, 2010). This Dutch discourse on women and labour makes it interesting to conduct the current research in the Netherlands, because it appears that Dutch women generally have a negative attitude towards the predominantly masculine ethics of the hierarchical work environment that seems to prevail in political institutes and financial businesses.
The empirical study of this thesis examines the discourse of female leaders in the Netherlands on their motivations to work in social movement organizations and their understanding of leadership within SMOs, and in this, often incorporates a comparison with the business sector. Moreover, it explores the connections between these two topics. To do so, the research questions of the current study are twofold. These will become clear in the following section.
2. Problem Statement & Research Questions
Despite the extensive interest in women’s movements, until recently, sociologists of social movements rarely suggest gender as a defining factor in the emergence and development of social movements (Taylor, 2001). The relatively little attention to gender by mainstream scholars of social movements provides an outstanding contrast to a growing body of research materials on women’s protest by feminist writers, which shows that gender is, in fact, an extensive feature of movements (Taylor, 2001). Although the role of women in social movements has been acknowledged, little is known about the sources of motivation behind their activism: what prompts women’s noteworthy attraction to social movements? Moreover, women seem particularly attracted to working in SMOs, the formal variant of social movements. The latter, which is even less explored in the literature, is precisely the focus of my empirical study. Therefore, the first research question of this thesis is the following: what motivates women in the Netherlands to work in SMOs?
Moreover, women’s employment in SMOs is characterized by a high level of female leadership. This suggests that women in SMOs have managed to pursue a kind of career mobility that is more rare in other sectors in the labour market. Not much empirical research exists on why this is the case. This study endeavours to contribute to a better understanding why, and notably through focusing on one dimension of this larger issue, namely (potentially different) understandings and conceptions of leadership, that are more aligned with how women move through the labour market. Thus, the second research question of this thesis can be summarized as: how do women in leadership positions in SMOs in the Netherlands understand leadership?
These two questions are further developed in a chapter of their own. Both of these chapters attend to gender and processes of gendering. Both questions, moreover, refer to different academic topics: social movements in the former and female leadership in the latter. In the theoretical framework, the first academic topic will be examined in the light of the literature on the global and historical involvement of women in movements for social change and the second academic topic will be examined by means of the literature on women’s global underrepresentation in the top layer of the business sector and the role female leadership plays in this. A third question that runs through this thesis and will especially be highlighted in the conclusion is the connection between these two conceptual topics: how does women’s remarkable role in social movements relate to their critical role in SMOs? By means of my empirical focus on exploring women’s narratives on their attraction towards SMOs and their understanding of female leadership within SMOs in the contemporary, Dutch context, I hope to complement relevant literature on these topics and in this way, contribute to a better understanding of the way women move through social movements and SMOs.
This study is divided into nine chapters. Chapters three and four describe the theoretical framework and literature review of the study. Chapter five provides the research design. Chapters six, seven and eight provide the empirical base for the study. Finally, the last chapter contains a conclusion and discussion of the research.
3. Gender & Social Movements
Introduction
Mainstream literature and research in the field of social movements have largely neglected the influence of gender on social protest. A growing body of feminist research, however, demonstrates that gender plays an imperative role in the emergence, nature, and outcomes of all social movements, even those that do not evoke the language of gender conflict or explicitly embrace gender change (Taylor, 1999). This chapter sets out to discuss prevailing theories and ideas in scholarly literature on the role gender plays in an understanding of social movements. With this goal in mind, I will discuss the way in which gender processes are embedded in the factors that trigger and sustain social movements, and in this I will build on understandings of resource mobilization theory, new social movements theory and classical collective behaviour theory, (Klandermans 1997; McAdam, McCarthy & Zald 1996; Tarrow 1998). This chapter emphasizes three sets of factors in which gender comes into play in social movements: the political and institutional context that supports and confines protest, the mobilizing structures and strategies through which protest is articulated, and the critical role of leadership within movements.
3.1 Political and Institutional Context
A central principle of resource mobilization theory concerns the role that changing opportunity structures play in the emergence and the attenuation of collective action: that is to say, it establishes a link between changes in institutionalized politics and the emergence and nature of social movements (McAdam, McCarthy, & Zald, 1996).
According to Ferree and Mueller (2004), one of the reasons that women were overrepresented in early and informal forms of protests is related to the possibility of political opportunity: for many women, the opportunity to access the political sphere was not available to them. Consequently, women in movements act in answer to a long-term traditional gendered divide of accessibility to political opportunity that is part of the organization of state and socio-normative forms of power. A consequence of the manner in which politics are organized along gendered lines is the institutional disadvantage of women in challenges pursued on ‘‘men’s’’ territory. Therefore, women tend to organize themselves outside the official political realm, in those community and grass-roots settings that are political in their own particular way.
As Ferree and Mueller (2004) point out, female activists themselves, historically and transnationally, are often hesitant to describe their communal mobilizations and movements as belonging to ‘‘politics,’’ which they perceive as a corrupt, self-serving, and male-dominated institute. As the gender divide creates a framework of opportunities for women which differs for men, still according to Ferree and Mueller (2004), women’s political alternatives are more present in the realms defined as ‘‘non-political’’: grass-roots movements, social work, communities, and social services. Moreover, when opportunities emerge for community movements to acquire public appreciation and become more ‘‘conventionally political,’’ women
as individuals and women as community groups often tend to withdraw from public leadership roles (Ferree & Mueller, 2004). An example of a woman that supported this idea was Ella Josephine Baker (1972), an influential African-American civil rights and human rights activist, who disapproved of professionalized, charismatic leadership and encouraged grassroots movements, with grassroots often contrasted to the political and institutional realm (Kaplan, 1997). An issue related to the gender differences in political opportunities is the ideology of separate spheres. This gender division in this ideology also plays a pivotal role in theories on gender and social movements.
The Ideology of Separate Spheres
Another issue that is important when discussing why women have been active in setting up movements and participating in existing social movements is the fact that more social categories than solely that of a woman applies to them. Women, just like all humans, are part of various social classes, labour organizations, religious, racial or sexual communities pursuing safety, inclusion and expression, and freedom omnipresent power of authority. Women have, however, continuously suffered, according to Roth & Horan (2001), from structural disadvantages with regard to the problematic issue of the construction of the public sphere, and therefore the political realm, as male and the private sphere, and therefore the domestic realm, as female. A woman participating the public political space is perceived to be transgressing her appropriate sphere, and to be transgressing her appropriate role as a woman. Consequently, women’s active stance in protests generally raised the question if women could legitimately demonstrate in public at all, posing a problem on women’s political participation not shared by men, who were perceived to belong in the public realm and were expected to be partaking in protest politics (Roth & Horan, 2001). Although in particular in the Western hemisphere, the force of the ideology of separate spheres has grown less during the years (Clark, Ramsbey, & Adler, 1991), the identification of public political realm as male is still present. One touching theme that is found in biographies of women’s public protest is the manner in which their partaking in movements influences their notion of themselves and their role in their communities (Naples, 1998). Women’s lives are shaped into a new form when they participate in social activism, as they transgress not only the very the “rules of politics as usual but the rules of gender as usual” (Roth & Horan, 2001). Consequently, women in social movements fighting for issues are almost always also implicitly fighting for gender issues and challenging social relations of power. This challenge becomes visiblewhen we look at the experiences and subjective meanings women create around the issues they combat.
The Subjective Dimension of Grassroots Activism
Grassroots protest activities have often been trivialized, neglected and viewed as self-interested actions that are particularistic and to go beyond a single-issue focus (Kling & Posner, 1990). In contrast, the study of Krauss (1993) on experiences and subjective meanings of women combatting toxic waste issues shows us that single issue protests are about more than just the single issue. According to Krauss (1993), these protests reveal a larger world of power and resistance, which in ways often directly challenge the social relations of power. Krauss (1993) argues that in traditional sociological analysis, this subjective aspect of protest has
often been neglected or viewed as private and individualist, but that feminist theory, however, shows its relevance. For feminists, the critical examination on the everyday world of experience is an imperative subjective aspect of social change (Collins, 1990; Ferree, 1992; Hartsock, 1994; Mueller, 1987; Smith, 1987; Taylor & Whittier, 1992, cited in Krauss, 1993). “Feminists show us how experience is not merely a personal, individualistic concept. It is social. People's experiences reflect where they fit in the social hierarchy”, contends Krauss (1993, p. 249) in confirmation of her research findings. She found that women from different backgrounds interpret their experiences of toxic waste problems within the context of their particular cultural histories: they start from different assumptions and arrive at concepts of environmental justice that reflect broader experiences and subjective meanings of class and race (Krauss, 1993).
This feminist rationale challenges the dominant social and political ideology (discussed in the previous paragraph) which separates the "public" sphere of policy and power from the "private" and personal sphere of everyday life. As has become clear from the previously written, the ideology of separate spheres consigns, by its conceptualization, the experiences and concerns of women around home and family to the domestic, nonpolitical arena. This divide leaves little space and visibility for women's grassroots protests, which often show how ordinary women subjectively link the specifics of their "private" lives with a broader analysis of power in the "public" realm (Krauss, 1993). This way, regardless of their specific aims social movements take women into the political realm, whether they want it or not.
3.2 Gendered Mobilizing Structures
Despite the strong relation between the gendered political sphere and the developmental character of collective action, the emergence of a social movement depends on whether upset communities are able to develop the organizational solidarity that is necessary to start a movement (Taylor, 1999). Insights from the resource mobilization tradition points to the importance of pre-existing mobilizing structures or links and ties among individuals that prevail before collective mobilization (Freeman 1975; McAdam 1986; Morris 1984, cited in Taylor, 1999). This paragraph is devoted to demonstrating that gender relations and hierarchy are deeply entrenched into mobilizing structures.
Gender inequalities are embedded in the informal social networks and formal organizations that contribute to the motivations that convince people to participate in collective action. Robnett (1997) for example argued that it was the rejection of women from leadership positions in the Black church, which forced women in the civil rights movement to employ leadership primarily at the grassroots and community levels. As this example shows, gender differentiation can also facilitate mobilization. As reported by Taylor (1999), gender division tends to trigger the formation of informal interpersonal networks that create the opportunities for women to fulfil their responsibilities for the care and nurturing of children and family members and for household survival. According to Krauss (1993), this, for example, explains at least partly why women predominate in the toxic waste movement, since they get involved in protest when a family member gets sick. In the literature on women in social movements, women are often framed as “mothers” and “caregivers” as though these roles are largely responsible for their critical role in movements. There are different ways to play the mother and caregivers politics, some more interesting and some more problematic.
For example, years of study on feminist politics led the scholar Miles (1996) to believe that women’s mobilization is an essential female characteristic that women from all over the world, in different contexts and periods, share with each other, because they are “universal caregivers”. In her book, “Crazy for Democracy” Temma Kaplan (1997) even argued that women leading protests merely act according to what she called “female consciousness”, in which she refers to the roles women employ as wives and mothers. This essentializing and categorizing women through their gender roles and “female virtue” comes close to what Butler (1990) refers to as the romanticization of female values –empathy, motherhood, caregiving- and so forth. According to her, certain feministic approaches as the ones mentioned above, seem to reify gender as an identity and thereby neglect that fact that is a social construction. Butler (1990, p. 46) identifies the explanatory schemes employed by these feminist scholars as “flawed, inadequate, and overly deterministic”. Along these lines is my argument that by overpraising feminine traits, feminist literature on social movements such as that of Miles (1996) and Kaplan (1997) engage in ‘cultural feminism’, which involves the ideology of a female nature or female essence reappropriated by feminists themselves in an effort to revalidate undervalued female attributes (Alcoff, 1988). As Alcoff (1988) points out, the cultural feminist, for example, construes woman's passivity as her peacefulness, her sentimentality as her proclivity to nurture, her subjectiveness as her advanced self-awareness, and so forth. By framing women in this manner, I built on Alcoff’s (1988) view that cultural feminists have not challenged the defining of woman itself but only that definition given by men. In attempting to speak for women, this kind of feminism often seems to presuppose that it knows what women truly are, but in this way, keeps contributing to the essentializing and stereotyping of women. To me it appears that the label of “mother” or “universal caregiver” is attached to these women by force of habit, resulting in conservative gender stereotypical confirmations.
3.3 Gender & Leadership in Social Movements
Another pivotal issue when analysing the role of gender in social movements is the concept of leadership. According to Morris and Staggenborg (2004), the degree of gender inequality in a community is one of the primary determinants of gender inequality in top levels of leadership in social movements. As a result of gender inequalities at the institutional level, the top levels of social movement leadership were often occupied by male leaders (Morris & Staggenborg, 2004). Nevertheless, women partake extensively in social movements and play pivotal roles in their nature and outcomes: by some scholars they are viewed as leaders, by some perceived as being clóse to leaders, but there is consensus on the idea that, historically, women were not incorporated in dominant notions of leadership in social movements. When they wére perceived as leader, after all, they were perceived as a peculiar kind of leader.
Robnett (1997) argues that women were profoundly involved in secondary leadership roles even when they were not involved in the top layers of civil rights movement leadership. She suggests that women are often in the role of being a ‘‘bridge leader,’’ which she defines as ‘‘an intermediate layer of leadership, whose task includes bridging potential constituents and adherents, as well as potential formal leaders to the movement’’ (Robnett, 1997, p. 191). Moreover, these leaders execute the bulk of a movement’s emotional work and play an imperative part during crises. According to Robnett (1997), female activists, as bridge
leaders, were able to cross the boundaries between the public life of a movement organization and the personal realms of members and potential members. By assigning women the role of “bridge leaders” Robett (1997) acknowledges women’s critical role in social movements and includes them in her notion of leadership. This idea contrasts the view of most scholars on social movement leadership, which generally define leaders as individuals that hold formal titles, exert authority over members, make decisions for the organization, and are seen as leaders the members and the state. Robnett (1997) has questioned these notions of leadership, proposing that they are too narrowly defined. She, among other scholars, broadens the notion of movement leadership by not restricting leadership to activities related to formal roles and masculine activities. Naturally, organizational theory has dealt with the distinction between formal and informal leadership. These definitions clarify the notion of bridge leaders. Etzioni (1961, p. 90) defines formal leaders as "actors who occupy organizational offices which entail power and who also have personal power over subordinates." Informal leaders are "actors within the organization who have personal but not official power over lower participants. " (Etzioni. 1961, p. 90). In Robnett’s (1997) view, women are often channelled away from formal leadership positions and confined to the informal level of leadership.
In social movement theory, informal leaders are regularly cited among the types of leaders, but little attention is devoted to analysing this position in terms of social categories like gender and the impact this has upon the attainment of movement goals. In line with Robnett (1993), I would argue that social movement theory leaves us with an idea that there are different types of leadership roles in social movements that individuals may take on, without contributing to an understanding of how these roles are constructed by the hierarchies and power structures that already exist in society and how the women often concerned in these roles respond to these dominant gender role expectations.
It may come as no surprise that feminist scholars have carefully attended to this gap and formulated their opinion on the power differentials that restricted women in critical “leadership” positions in social movements. The next paragraph elaborates on this.
The Respectability Trap
This paragraph uses the ideas of the feminist scholar Hickey (2013), who wrote an essay on women in social movements in the 20th century, for the sake of examining how women in that time dealt with the burden to
follow to societal expectancies: in particular, the expectancies related to being a ‘good woman’. She studied women who powerfully positioned themselves within rather radical movements for social change and yet sometimes struggled when it came to conforming to normative codes of behaviour and looks. Occasionally knowingly, but frequently not, female activists found themselves caught in a “respectability trap” (Hickey, 2013). “In these moments,” Hickey proclaims, “women have shaped, curtailed, or rearranged their behaviours or appearances to meet certain social connotations or normative gender expectations, even when those gender conventions contradict larger goals or ideologies held by these activists” (Hickey, 2013, p. 2). Respectability, then, comprised of a set of ideas, normative values, and behavioural codes that could restrain women’s access to the public sphere and create barriers to taking on leadership positions (Hickey, 2013).
That is to say; society had laid an effective trap for women who challenged the status quo. When it came to leadership positions, respectability could work against women in multiple ways. In many social movements leadership has been constructed as masculine, so being a “good woman” worked to activists’ disadvantage because it ensured the women did not acquire this position. The risk accompanying this issue is that openly refusing to adopt gendered norms of behaviour could jeopardize the reputation of the cause concerned (Hickey, 2013). Respectability was often “the price of admission” for social change leaders looking to convince a broader public of their movement’s value.
Ultimately, Hickey (2013) claims that respectability was the trap it was for so many female activists for two reasons. The first is that respectability and how one ‘appears’ to society does matter because, for women in specific, it is entwined with morality. Then, as Nancy Duncan argues in her article on the ideology of separate spheres, “to be labelled immoral – as women who transgressed gendered norms in public space often are – is an effective means of silencing women” (Duncan, 1996, p. 140). Women who failed to appear appropriately respectable risked everything from public embarrassment to exclusion from the organizations and causes they stood for. Second, argues Hickey (2013), respectability is related to maintaining social recognition and the privileges that it offers. To defy norms of behaviour or standards of appearance – and the manner in which these operate as symbols of privilege associated with the middle or upper class, whiteness, and heterosexuality – is to trade away the privileges and protections associated with these social groups. In accordance with Hickey (2013), I believe, it is necessary to examine women’s activists and the movements they serve in the light of this knowledge.
Conclusion
This chapter displays the ways in which powerful gender structures, prevailing in our society, continue to penetrate the public and private spheres in which social movements move. As such, social movements cannot outrun the normative gender roles reflected in culture, resulting in women’s particular strategies and roles to deal with these restrictions. In summary, this chapter shows how women in social movements fighting for issues are almost always also implicitly fighting for gender issues and challenging social relations of power.
4. Gender & Leadership
Introduction
As the previous chapter showed, women historically played a critical role in social movements. In a certain way, this placed them in the public realm while the political and business realm was still male-dominated. In many ways, this also applies to contemporary times. Today, especially in the Western hemisphere, many social movements have developed into formal and professional SMOs. While women scarcely negotiated formal leadership roles in social movements, this pattern seems to have changed in contemporary SMOs, where women often function as formal leaders. It appears as though women in SMOs have managed to pursue a kind of career mobility that is more rare in other sectors in the labour market. Why is this the case? My empirical research is devoted to this question, which remains under researched. To answer this question, it is also necessary to review existing literature on female leadership barriers. Highlighting the reasons why there so few women are in the top of the business sector, helps me to explain why this is different in the SMO world. In turn, I can relate this to characteristics and mechanisms in social movements and women’s role in them.
The first paragraph will discuss dominant metaphors used to explain the challenges faced by women in advancing their career. The goal of the second paragraph is to provide a brief overview of existing psychological and managerial theories and concepts on female leadership styles and view those through a critical (and often feminist) sociological lens. As such, this chapter comprises a context for the underlying basis of my second research question: what are the reasons that women have broken many barriers of issues concerning female leadership scarcity within SMOs? With this question in mind, this chapter comprises dominant theories and thoughts in the literature on women’s global underrepresentation in the top layer of the business sector on the one hand and previous research on female leadership on the other hand.
4.1 Explanatory Metaphors
Women as leaders have made great strides over the past decade but still face many challenges – they still do not have equality with men, particularly in business and politics (Catalyst, 2011). According to Wolfe (2008), a popular belief is that leadership and success are linked to a person having the “right stuff”. Eagly and Carli (2007) resist this popular belief and claim that this leads to the blaming of gender differences as responsible for leadership barriers for women in organizations, which in turn leads to the unacceptable idea that women are made of the “wrong stuff” for leadership positions. To counteract this belief, multiple theories are developed to explain prevalent and predominant societal power mechanisms, gender role expectations, and pervasive forms of gender bias that are responsible for the challenges women encounter in climbing the career ladder. While there are numerous metaphors prevalent to illustrate the challenges faced by women advancing the workplace, the main metaphors that will be reviewed in this paragraph are “the glass ceiling”, “the sticky floor”, and “the labyrinth”.
The Glass Ceiling
Glass ceiling has become a popular term after it was used in The Wall Street Journal by Hymowitz and Schellhardt in 1986 (Smith, Caputi, & Crittenden, 2012). The formerly used term “the concrete wall”- which was used to describe the phenomenon that women were totally excluded from all positions of authority -did not fit anymore: since barriers had shifted, women were only excluded from the highest levels (Eagly & Carli, 2007). The glass ceiling metaphor implies that women can advance to high positions within leadership but cannot break through the final barrier to reach the top, and it also assumes that those concealed influences are unlikely simply to disappear over time; a ceiling is not a structure that can easily fade away. Although this term is already 30 years old, it is still a common way of regarding the scarcity of women at the top levels of originations.
According to Eagly and Carli (2007) the metaphor of the glass ceiling falls short in multiple respects, of which I will discuss four. First, it erroneously assumes the presence of an absolute barrier at a specific high level in organizations. Second, it erroneously suggests that all barriers to women are difficult to detect and therefore unforeseen. Third, it precludes the possibility that women can overcome barriers and become leaders. Fourthly, it erroneously assumes that there exists a single, homogenously barrier and thereby neglects the complexity and multiplicity of obstacles that women leaders can face.
That is to say, Eagly and Carli (2007) develop a clear argument: the glass ceiling no longer fits to explain the underrepresentation of women in powerful roles: the glass ceiling has broken. According to the authors, the glass ceiling metaphor conveys an absolute, impermeable barrier, but barriers to women’s advancement are now more permeable. With an ongoing change, the obstacles that women face have become conquerable, at least by some women, some of the time. Paths to the top occur, and some women find them. The successful routes can be difficult to discover, however, so Eagly and Carli (2007) propose an alternative metaphor to label these circuitous paths: the labyrinth.
Labyrinth
The labyrinth provides a more nuanced metaphor that focuses on women’s career journeys as a whole, not just at the height of their career, like the glass ceiling. It acknowledges the obstacles women face throughout their careers but nevertheless suggests that it is possible to navigate a successful route to reach high levels of leadership.
The labyrinth contains numerous barriers, some subtle and others quite obvious, such as the expectation that mothers will provide the lion’s share of childcare (Eagly & Carli, 2007). Yet, there are almost no exclusionary rules and few definite, widely used norms of exclusion. Glass ceiling beliefs that deny women high positions merely on the basis of their sex now appear to most decision makers as discriminating. According to Eagly and Carli (2007), most decision makers want people to be hired and promoted in the workplace based on their abilities and achievements. Disqualified people from positions at any level merely because of their gender, race, or religion, is not an accepted view. With improvement towards equal opportunities for men and women, the barriers that women now encounter no longer take the form of an absolute wall or an exclusionary ceiling at a particular level. Instead, women can attain high positions, but finding the pathways requests considerable skill and some luck: some women have great skill, and a few also have incredibly good luck (Eagly & Carli, 2007). These women negotiate these labyrinth paths to positions of power, authority, and prestige, regardless of the discriminatory obstacles that they may face along the way. In line with Eagly and Carli (2007), I would argue that the labyrinth metaphor more aptly represents the complexity of the causes of women’s contemporary situation as leaders.
The Sticky Floor
The “Sticky floor” is a metaphor with two understandings. First, in contrast to the metaphor of the glass ceiling, it has been used to explain why women are being held back in lowly paid jobs at the bottom levels of organizations (Kee, 2006). Such women are even unable to reach the glass ceiling because they do not have the chance to rise above the sticky floor. Second, and more commonly, the sticky floor metaphor refers to situations where women are accused of preventing themselves from progression by choosing poor career trajectories or opting out of leadership paths completely (Smith, Caputi, & Crittenden, 2012). According to a growing number of popular books written by women, women self-sabotage their careers and are responsible for self-imposed barriers in workplaces. The titles of these books suggest that women have to make major changes in their career strategies and adapt to the game men play. Some titles are: Play Like A Man, Win Like A Woman: What Men Know About Success That Women Need To Learn (Evans, 2001), 101 Unconscious Mistakes Women Make That Sabotage Their Careers (Frankel, 2004); It's Not A Glass Ceiling, It's A Sticky Floor: Free Yourself From The Hidden Behaviors Sabotaging Your Career Success (Schambaugh, 2007). In the latter book, Rebecca Shambaugh, a prominent leadership strategist, proclaims that “usually women blame the old boys' club or the glass ceiling for the dearth of women at the top. But I have seen something different. Accomplished women are holding themselves back. It's not the external obstacles. They need to look within” (Shambaugh, 2007, p. 14).
This narrative reflects a number of assumptions that are wide-spread in the current political economy. In an essay on the recent popular themes in self-help books, I discussed the idea that empowering oneself through the pursuit of self-actualization has been appropriated as a top priority for citizens in society, particularly in the work field.2 Building on Rose (1992), I argued that self-actualization relates to a work
ethic where the worker is an individual in search of responsibility, self-direction, and a sense of personal achievement. The “sticky floor” discourse, where women themselves are blamed for the barriers they encounter in the workplace, to me seems an example of a neoliberal strategy of self-government, since a shift in responsibility is created from the institute (which is in fact, in endless aspects problematic for women) to the individual woman and the community of women. By negotiating the challenges women face in their career in this discourse, by holding themselves responsible, old hard-wired systems of gender discrimination, roles and expectations are neglected.
4.2 Theories on Female Leadership Styles
Although in the introduction of this thesis I already explained which notion of leadership I will use in the context of this thesis, I would like to linger on the notion of leadership some more. Bass, a famous leadership analyst (1990, p. 11), once said: “there are almost as many definitions of leadership as there are persons who have attempted to define the concept”, and I must say that after sifting through many, many definitions of leadership I have to agree. Reviewing these definitions, it strikes me that the vast majority are of Western origin, and that they have an overwhelmingly male face. This comes as no surprise since the large share of recent scholarship on leadership comes out of the management schools and tends to focus on the accomplishment of corporate goals and effective management. Batliwaha (2011, p. 18) created a composition of the core ideas that were reflected in recent scholarship on leadership which I find a useful summary in the light of this context:
“A set of actions and processes, performed by individuals of character, knowledge, and integrity, who have the capacity to create a vision for change, inspire and motivate others to share that vision, develop ideas, and strategies that direct and enable others to work towards that change, and make critical decisions that ensure the achievement of the goal.”
Batliwaha (2011) highlights the apparent gap in this definition: namely, the absence of any politics, context, or vision about the nature of the “change” that leadership pursues to bring, as though the goal of leadership does not alter its nature. Sociologist James Downton intended to respond to this lacuna when he articulated the concept of transformational leadership (Downtown, 1973), a style of leadership “where one or more persons engage with others in such a way that leaders and followers raise one another to higher levels of motivation and morality. Power bases are linked not as counterweights but as mutual support for common purpose...transforming leadership ultimately becomes moral in that it raises the level of human conduct and ethical aspiration of both leader and led, and thus it has a transforming effect on both” (Burns, 1978, p. 20). Burns, a political scientist, further developed Downton’s work and contrasted the concept of transformational leadership with transactional leadership, which accepts the goals, culture and structure of the existing organization or enterprise, and is essentially based on conventional motivation, reward, punishment, and compliance; change is achieved incrementally, and the motivators are extrinsic (Burns, 1978). According to Batliwaha (2011), Burn’s and Downtown’s ideas have considerable resonance with emerging thinking on feminist leadership. While Batliwaha (2011), a feminist activist and scholar herself,
argues that though feminists criticise the use of terms like moral and morality, these developments in theorizing leadership help to identify, varying per cultural context and history, prevailing models of leadership are deeply situated within us, “even if we are feminist women – and men - seeking to change our own practice”. Although Burn’s and Downtown’s perspectives on leadership in a first stance seem feminist in some way, I believe that literature on transformational and transactional generally contributes to the confirmation of gender stereotypes and in a very particular way oppresses women: in this sense, this thinking is not very feminist at all. I will elaborate on this shortly, but in order to do so, I consider it necessary to briefly demonstrate prevailing ideas in psychological and managerial research on transformational and transactional leadership, as a full understanding of these ideas will help to substantiate my argument.
In these specific academic schools devoted to the research of leadership styles, it is ubiquitously recognized that there are differences in a male versus female style in leading. In accordance with multiple psychological studies, Rosener (1990) states that engaging in “transformational’’ leadership is typical of female leaders and “transactional” leadership is more typical of male leaders.
Models of transformational leadership, while not new, are still regarded as modern and ground-breaking in relation to earlier approaches (Chin, Lott, Rice, & Sanchez-Hucles, 2008). Nevertheless, Fletcher (2004) argues that, while on the surface they seem to incorporate some feminist thinking, they have been established predominantly by nonfeminist men, still present the leader in “heroic” terms, and are focused on individuals rather than groups. These models underline the importance of relational skills for successful leadership and management, building on ideas of what are considered “feminine” skills, that is, stereotypic understandings of women. Women in Western culture (particularly those who are White and middle class) have been and still are expected to manifest certain qualities in their thinking and action (Eagly & Johannesen-Schmidt, 2001). These are communal qualities,
assumed to be symbols of femininity, and include friendliness, kindness, and unselfishness. According to Eagly and Carli (2007, people expect female leaders to speak more tentatively, not draw so much attention to themselves, accept others’ suggestions, support others, and solve interpersonal problems. These are distinguished from the “independent traits” assigned to “masculinity” and men, such as assertiveness and instrumental competence (Eagly & Carli, 2003). The anticipating on these qualities comes disturbingly close to
essentializing women (and men!) and playing into long-standing gender stereotypes, even if unintentionally. In line with Eagly and Carli (2003), I agree that gender role expectations spill over onto leadership roles. The expected feminine leadership characteristics or behaviours, which can be related to “helping people to grow” can be associated with women’s roles within their domestic lives. In this, these women have the burden of negotiating two roles: women and leader. They have to reconcile the communal qualities that people prefer in women with the agentic qualities that people think leaders need to exhibit to succeed. LaFrance (2001, p. 254) argues that these are contradictory expectations: “on the one hand, they are
Male Female Structure Consideration Transactional Transformational Autocratic Participative Instruction-giving Socio-expressive Business-oriented People-oriented
Figure 1. Female & male leadership styles in psychological and managerial research
expected to be “socioemotional” but, as leaders, they are required to be task-focused”. They can do both, LaFrance suggests, by adopting a non-hierarchical and democratic style. Finding an appropriate and effective leadership style is, therefore, a task that requires subtlety, and women know this.
The supposedly valuing of so-called feminine-related skills has not managed to trigger much of a change in the gender of organizational leaders, confirming Fletcher’s (2004) statement that the rhetoric of transformational leadership is substantially ahead of the practice. Discrimination against women in top positions in business continues (Lott, 2008). Fletcher (2004) argues that a leadership style conforming to expectations for women “isn’t really good for women.” Such behaviour will not benefit from the same appreciation as it does for men, since it is considered “natural” for women. Albino (1999, p. 28, as cited in Eagly, 2001) notes that the “leadership styles usually associated with women...are... often employed by effective leaders of either gender.” But it is still the gender of the leader that concerns observers who filter judgments through the lens of cultural expectations. Applause for the same sensitive and cooperative leadership is more likely to apply to a man than to a woman.
In the volume “Models of Leadership and Women,” Bernice Lott (2008) offers us useful insights about prevailing approaches to leadership and women. She confirms that the attributes of feminine leadership styles are all within the accepted gendered roles of women. Lott (2008) emphasizes that it is critical to make a distinction between feminine and feminist leadership, since the former does not engage with gender power and women’s lack of access to formal positions of authority. “A leadership style that conforms to the way women are expected to behave, whether attributed to nature, socialization, or gender role, is not the same as a style that is feminist” she proclaims (Lott, 2008, p. 25). Situating women’s behaviour in femininity and gender fails to point out women’s lesser power compared to men, and fails to acknowledge the fact of heterogeneity (Lott, 2008).Essential in feminism is incorporation of the role of power in affecting people’s lives: this does not happen within most of contemporary research on female leadership.
Conclusion
In summary, this chapter has discussed various theories on how the challenges women face in their career come into being. The insights of these theories generally come down to delineating gender role
expectations which restrict women in sometimes subtle and other times quite obvious ways. Moreover, several contemporary approaches to leadership styles have been considered. I have argued that these theories come close to essentializing women in their approach to leadership style, and thereby contribute to the reinforcement of restricting gender roles in this discourse. The gathered knowledge on female leadership scarcity in the political and corporate realm, can perhaps help to explain why the
aforementioned barriers women face in these sectors are more rare in the SMO sector. In the light of this knowledge, my empirical study focuses on exploring (1) what motivates women to work in SMOs and (2) how women in leadership positions in SMOs understand leadership?
5. Research Design
Research Method
In order to expound on the involvement of women in social movements and their understanding of leadership in SMOs, this research is grounded in a qualitative methodology. The following section outlines the various aspects of the methodology, including research methods, sampling techniques, analytical strategy, ethical considerations, and anticipated difficulties related to the research.
Based on a literature review, the current study consists of an empirical research which comprises in-depth interviews. While theories and concepts used in the theoretical framework and literature review have a general reach, the empirical part of the study is focused on women in the Netherlands. This implies that the results of the empirical data are not necessarily generalizable to women in other countries.
Semi-Structured In-depth Interviews
In order to answer my two research questions, I conducted in-depth interviews with women in leadership positions in SMOs. The aim of these interviews was to gain profound and meaningful insight into women’s reasons for involvement in organizations that focus on causes for social change and the core notions of female understandings of leadership within the SMOs they work for.
I have chosen to employ in-depth interviews out of interest for how women give meaning to their experiences, which I prefer over using explaining theories on an abstract level. Another benefit of interviews is that is becomes possible to generate unpredicted answers that deviate from the literature. This way, inductive codes can be discovered and developed, which can lead to new theories (Hennink et al., 2011). The semi-structured interview technique is highly appropriate for the current study as it offers the interviewees a great deal of freedom in the way they respond, while the structured component warrants continuity and permits the interviewer to ask fundamental questions. This method incorporates the complexity of social phenomena and an awareness that a general explanation is only a partial explanation. However, it does involve certain implications: it is pivotal for the researcher to reflect on what she interprets, how she interprets and what biases come into play on both sides.
I acknowledge that by making use of interviews, I am constructing a narrative: both interviewer and interviewee affect the results in an interaction with each other. As an interviewer, there is the risk of phrasing questions in a manner that they correspond to presumptions, resulting in self-fulfilling answers or there is the risk of altered responses of the interviewee due to answers that confirm norms and expectations. Nevertheless, I believe that this method above all offers opportunities by providing insight into the subjective world of women’s thoughts, which come up to the surface and develop into stories through our unique interaction. This way, the constructed narrative shows the interviewees’ representation of reality.
Sampling and Research Population
For this research, participants have been selected through judgmental sampling. Judgmental sampling relies on the judgement of the researcher when it comes to selecting the –in this case- individuals that are to be studied (Ponemon & Wendell, 1995). This method of sampling is appropriate because the sample that has been investigated is quite small. Given that this study is focused on women in leadership positions in SMOs in the Netherlands, potential participants have been selected according to their occupational status and involvement in SMOs. The sample comprises of 16 women of whom most have been living in the Netherlands for more than ten years and most are Dutch or half Dutch. They are aged between 28-62 and concerns women leading an entire organization or a department within the organization. Interviews ranged from 40 to 80 minutes in length. All of them were conducted in person, and most of them took place in the office of the participant.
I chose to use my own network to get in contact with the participants, as it was the most accessible way: my personal contacts were used as gate-keepers since many of them work in the SMO community.A disadvantage of using my own social network is that this may have influenced the sample. Furthermore, it should be taken into account that using personal contacts can lead to a research population with many similar features such as education and ethnicity. Findings brought up in this research are therefore not per se generalizable across communities.
Analytical Strategy
In the current study, I made use of abductive analysis. Abductive analysis begins with inductive analyses of data but moves beyond this induction by interpreting and double-checking these interpretations with more data (Timmermans & Tavory, 2012). As such, abduction adopts grounded theory recommendations to move back and forth between data and theory iteratively.Abductive analysis is aimed at theory construction, by giving special attention to unforeseen empirical findings against a background of multiple existing sociological theories and through a method of methodological analysis (Timmermans & Tavory, 2012).
The analysis of the data started during the data collection stage. This allowed for the uncovering of new themes and gradually adjusting of the interview questions. During and after the interview period in which I performed all the interviews, I transcribed and anonymized the interview data. Subsequently, I uploaded all the interviews onto ATLAS.ti qualitative software. I created codes by generally scanning through interviews and documenting main themes and answers to the research questions. That is to say, I created all the codes inductively. After organizing the data onto ATLAS.ti I coded and analysed the data in a strategic and repetitive way. This process allowed for opportunities to discover relations between data and theories and facilitated the identification of patterns and overarching themes (Saldaña, 2009). Simultaneous to the coding process, memos were written to capture ideas, patterns, reflections, findings and connections between codes and overarching themes of the data.
Ethical Considerations
With the aim to guarantee that the research was performed in an ethical way, voluntary participation in the research was a precondition at all times. Every participant was made cognizant of their right to withdraw from the research at any time. Prior to any interview, informed consent was obtained.
Furthermore, the well-being and anonymity of participants was treasured at all times; all sensitive or potentially harmful information will be anonymized. The names of the NGOs are only revealed in the analysis when named in a general context and when there is no risk of compromising anonymity.
6. What Motivates Women in the Netherlands to Work in SMOs?
IntroductionThis chapter sets out to discuss the experiences and narratives of female leaders which will form a framework of reasons for their attraction towards working in SMOs. As such, these findings can on the one hand complement literature on women’s striking historical involvement in social movements and on the other hand explain their contemporary overrepresentation in NGOs. There are two main components that attract women to working in SMOs: the good cause that NGOs pursuit and the organizational working environment of SMOs, which are often mentioned in comparison with, and contrasting to, the corporate sector. First, the attraction towards the good causes of SMOs can be related to women’s global dominant role in social movements, and second, the attraction towards the working environment of SMOs can be used to explain why barriers concerning female leadership scarcity are less prevalent in the SMO world than the corporate sector and can furthermore be related to theories of female leadership.
6.1 The Good Cause
A reason why my interlocutors feel attracted towards working in SMOs has to do with the value they attach to commit themselves to work towards a better world. Respondents often made the comparison between putting their efforts into a “meaningful” cause such as at an SMO or putting their efforts into a “useless” cause such as in the business sector:
"I resigned from my last job because I wanted to do something that I can connect to, I want to follow my heart, do something that matters, something that makes me run and fly, something that really makes a difference. So yeah, it has to contribute to a better world. I just can’t imagine that you devote your whole life to something that is not relevant, something that has no value, how do you sell that to yourself?"
“But what is meaningful?” I consistently replied when women brought up the importance of meaningfulness. An often-heard response was something that improved the condition of the world, either in relation to animals and nature or in relation to people. This moving forward, this focus on innovation is a central theme in the discourses of these women. They feel distanced to the old ways of doing things in society and mention to experience a drive and attraction towards change. It seems as if they are opposed by many systems and structures they identify as fixed and inflexible. Many respondents stated that modernity has brought many advantages in the field of gender equality and are hopeful that as time passes this will become even better. They are optimistic, as changing times have always been a good predictor of their independency and freedom. This can partly explain women’s attraction towards “the new” and their ambition to make the world “a better place”:
"I always want to improve something. Improve a process. I think everybody should aim for that. I’m someone who likes to fight for something, I just want to change things and make something better and that's the field I really love to work in, making society better. So that's my drive. "
This will to make society better can perhaps by explained by the fact that it helps women to psychologically deal with contemporary injustice issues. Some if my interlocutors mentioned that if they make an effort to do something about contemporary problems, it helps to lift the weight of their shoulders. Anyhow, it is often brought up that their will to commit themselves to a good cause is related to emotions and feelings of empathy: some interlocutors can really feel the pain of others’ misfortunes, some feel angry at the injustice, and others feel happy and good about themselves if they care for others in need. The following quote illustrates this:
"The injustice in the world really makes me feel sad. I really feel the suffering of others in my body. And I think it’s better to do something about it than to feel powerless and sad. You put your thoughts into something, in an act. Doing nothing is not an option. That's the thing: maybe I’m naïve to think we can change the world, but if we hadn’t been here, it might be even worse. So, I think: yes, we can painfully watch everything going wrong, or we can try to do something and take care of each other. And then I rather choose that last option. "
An insight that emerges here is the importance of emotional attachment. According to Eschle and Maiguashca (2007), emotional attachment is crucial for the construction of solidarity, which is important in the light of social movements in the sense that emotional attachment is imperative for the making of collective subjects of resistance. My interlocutors make it evident that shared experiences and feelings of empathy and affinity are vital to their drive to commit themselves to a good cause. This idea contrasts the more rationalist understandings in social movement theories by recognizing that emotional feelings of attachment do, in fact, play a role in the creation of the solidarity that is necessary to launch a movement (and in this case, to work in an SMO). Also, it is important to acknowledge that empathy can go beyond intimate relations, since many of my interlocutors expressed their motivation to act out of empathy with the suffering of those beyond their close social network. To this extent, I argue that the particular kind of activism my interlocutors engage in exemplifies ‘politics for and on behalf of others’ (Eschle & Maiguashca, 2007).
A second insight that arises here is the women’s impetus that it is imperative to take care of people in need. In his work on relational ethics, the contributions of Noddings (1984) are relevant to this issue. Noddings (1984) reasoned that the “natural caring” that results automatically from love or other intimate relationships forms the basis of “ethical caring,” which encompasses determination and commitment to care for others in order to live morally. However, Noddings’ (1984) notion of “ethical caring” has been criticized by Carse and Nelson (1996) because it only concerns care for people in geographic or social proximity. Instead, they proposed an alternative, namely: caring about. They noted that in order to be motivated to fight for the social justice problems of others, it requires that these “others” are being cared
