The Triple Threat to Women’s Leadership Development in Events: A Gendered Organization Perspective

This paper explores the hidden ways in which event organizations are gendered and how this affects the development of women’s leadership careers, using a qualitative, feminist approach. Data was collected through a Delphi study with panelists from the United Kingdom and Australia. Through this research, we contribute to the development of Gendered Organizations theory in the fields of Human Resources and Organizational Behavior by providing empirical evidence for the gendered nature of an industry, addressing criticisms of this approach for its ‘taken for granted’ application in prior research. By foregrounding the voices of women working in events, we propose a new model of the factors that influence the development of women’s leadership careers in a women-majority, yet still neosexist setting. Women are discriminated against based on the gendered perceptions of women in the event industry, the gendered perception of some event work as women’s work, and the hidden concept of the impossible to embody ‘perfect age’ to work in events.