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Lookup NU author(s): Professor Sharon MavinORCiD, Dr Marina YusupovaORCiD
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC 4.0).
This paper is an intervention in current trends of thinking about competition and gender in essentialist and stereotypical ways. Such thinking has produced numerous comparative studies measuring competitiveness of women and men; ‘proving’ men as competitive and women as non-competitive. Based on experiments and written questionnaires, these studies reduce gender to perceived biological sex and treat competition as a ‘self-evident,’ static and easily measurable phenomenon. To contribute new understandings and learning, we surface five fallacies of this comparative research, explaining why the approach is misleading, inequitable and socially harmful. Drawing upon gender as a social construction and women leaders’ narratives, we offer a blueprint for democratizing knowledge production. We write differently, choosing not to provide a ‘balanced’ view of the field and construct competition as a processual, complex and contextually specific phenomenon with underlying gender dynamics, rather than a discrete, observable and fixed in time event. The paper provides learning: for leaders and managers to resist automatic categorisation on the basis of perceived biological sex; for management educators to challenge the ways that leadership and management are traditionally taught; and, for executive coaches to support changes in practice, by embracing complexity of the contemporary contexts in which leaders operate.
Author(s): Mavin S, Yusupova M
Publication type: Article
Publication status: Published
Journal: Management Learning
Year: 2021
Volume: 52
Issue: 1
Pages: 86-108
Print publication date: 01/02/2021
Online publication date: 15/09/2020
Acceptance date: 25/07/2020
Date deposited: 15/10/2020
ISSN (print): 1350-5076
ISSN (electronic): 1461-7307
Publisher: Sage Publications
URL: https://doi.org/10.1177/1350507620950176
DOI: 10.1177/1350507620950176
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