An intersectional approach to gender and leadership development: Juxtaposing critical understandings of multiple identities, the ontology of leadership, and discourses of diversity management

This paper is chiefly concerned with critically articulating the conceptual relationships between potential multiple identity (dis)advantages facing women and the effectiveness of leadership development practices. Although leadership development has been systematically studied in recent years (e.g. Day, Fleenor, Atwater, Sturm, and McKee, 2014; Ely, Ibarra, and Kolb, 2011), much less is known about its relation to gender (Ely et al, 2011). Furthermore, even less has been written about leadership development from the theoretical perspective of intersectionality (McCall, 2005; Sanchez-Hucles and Davis, 2010; Walby, Armstrong and Strid, 2012).