What are we waiting for? How gendered temporal experiences maintain the gender leadership gap

This paper explicates the concept of waiting as a temporal experience of women in leadership development pipelines. By drawing on Simone de Beauvoir’s work that emphasizes the way time is organized and lived is gendered, we aim to explain what women are waiting for, why they wait, and trace some of the career and leadership development consequences of waiting for women. Based on 81 interviews with both women and men directors who are part of a corporate leadership development pipeline, we discovered four forms of waiting can be ascribed to women through women’s own experiences and through observations from their peer male colleagues: to be recognized, to be ready, for the firm to direct their career, and for the right time to relocate with their family. We show that in some situations women enact a waiting temporal mode, which is a passive, constrained embodied style that is gendered and learned. We explain why they wait and theorize how waiting in the context of the firm’s leadership development program creates dilemmas that women have to grapple with on top of the challenge of becoming a competent leader. Our study contributes to the literature on leadership development by bringing attention to a common and mundane, yet undertheorized temporal phenomenon that has implications for how leadership development processes should be designed and executed. In doing so, it decenters the focus on becoming to show how individuals experience their development in different ways with varying consequences. Further, our discussion of waiting contributes an explanation regarding how gender disparity is maintained in leadership positions.