‘I don’t want to be known for it’: Girls, leadership role models and the problem of representation

Abstract

An absence of role models in girlhood is a popularly cited cause of the shortage of women in decision-making positions in adulthood. The power of leadership exists in a close relationship with public visibility, and this relationship is regularly foregrounded in adult interventions that seek to stimulate girls’ leadership aspirations through the public pedagogy of role models. We explore the problematic nature of such popular solutions through a framework suggested by feminist critique of the ‘fetishisation’ of representation, by their media effects foundations and by their alignment with neoliberal logics. Drawing on group interview workshops conducted in five English state schools, we find that role-model solutions offer an overly simplistic view of girls’ engagements with public figures, and that they recognise neither the contemporary conditions of women’s visibility nor how such conditions regulate girls’ imaginings of power along axes of ‘race’ and class as well as gender.