Beyond the glass ceiling: how women leaders narrate governance and resilience in a journalistic meta-organization

This paper presents a qualitative case study of the Brazilian Coalition for the Defense of Journalism (CDJor), a meta-organization formed amid escalating violence and disinformation. Drawing on semi-structured interviews with ten women leaders across the coalition’s member organizations, we examine how participants constructed connections between sustained operational capacity and their governance model. We analyze these accounts as sense-making performances: narratives through which participants rendered their coalition coherent, drawing on theoretical resources to manage the tension between celebrating care and acknowledging its costs. This study examines how participants narrate the causal story connecting women’s leadership to effectiveness, what resources they deploy, and what tensions they hold in suspension. By foregrounding internal governance as participants constructed it, this research complicates assumptions that hierarchical organizing is the default mode of effective coordination and specifies how participants construct gender as a resource for organizational sense-making within feminist institutionalist theory.