Women Learning to Become Managers: Learning to Fit in or to Play a Different Game?

Abstract

This article explores women's experiences of learning to become managers. We do not provide a comparison of women and men learning to become managers but highlight women s experiences and therefore `change the subject'. This includes the subject as person and the subject as topic, leading us to look at women rather than men as managers, investigating women learning to become managers rather than men. In the article we discuss empirical data resulting from a questionnaire and subsequent thematic group discussion with `average' women managers. We highlight the importance to women managers of learning from and with others and focus on the contradiction women managers face, that of whether to learn to fit in to the dominant paradigm of management or to play a different game, to do management differently.