Paradoxes of co-opting women into leadership positions: Disparities in their identities as labour leaders in Spain

This article examines how women trade unionists in Spain construct and negotiate their leadership identities within organisations historically shaped by masculine norms. Drawing on a qualitative study based on 25 semi-structured interviews with women who currently hold or have held positions of responsibility within the main trade unions in the Basque Country or as union delegates representing them in various contexts, it explores the meanings attributed to leadership and the trajectories to power as narratives that underpin political identity. From a theoretical approach combining social constructionism and feminist poststructuralism, the article proposes a discursive reading of leadership as an unstable, situated and contested identity. The analysis identifies two key dynamics. Firstly, co-optation mechanisms enable access to power but also generate ambivalence and identity gaps that condition recognition while opening spaces for resistance and alternative forms of leadership. Secondly, when leadership is not linked to feminist objectives, women's identification as leaders becomes more fragile and less politicised. Rather than consolidating itself as a fixed identity, leadership is often exercised as a contextual and deliberative strategy that challenges normative frameworks of authority. The study offers a situated but potentially transferable perspective on the discursive construction of leadership in gendered terms, highlighting precarious yet significant forms of female agency in masculinised contexts and providing tools for rethinking their possibilities for re-signification. • First study on women union leaders' identities in Spain with transferable insights. • Co-optation allows women to access power but creates conflicting authority narratives • Leadership acts as a contextual strategy, not a fixed or stable identity. • The “leader” label is normatively uninhabitable but enables subversive agency. • Without feminist aims, women's leadership identity in masculinised contexts is fragile.