Majority without authority: Discursive power and women’s leadership in Indian public relations

This study examines the lived experiences of senior women leaders in India’s Public Relations and Corporate Communication sector to explore how gendered power operates within a feminized field. Using a Foucauldian discursive framework, it analyses how organizational norms, societal expectations, and postfeminist and neoliberal narratives shape leadership subjectivities. Findings suggest that public relations functions as a gendered site which imposes a symbolic burden upon women as they navigate culturally-coded expectations around leadership and femininity. To establish legitimacy, women enact gendered recalibration to balance the demands of leadership with expectations of respectable femininity. Their agency emerges as fundamentally ambivalent as they strategically navigate and reframe dominant discourses to assert authority, even while these practices may simultaneously reproduce existing hierarchies. By augmenting voices from the Global South, the study extends gender scholarship in public relations and highlights how discursive mechanisms sustain inequality within women-majority organisations. Findings further suggest that meaningful change can be enacted through organization-level interventions that interrogate the very norms through which leadership is constructed and legitimised.