Who Runs the World: Girls, Leadership, and Women in the Public Eye

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Description

What do teenage girls think of leadership when power is concentrated amongst the white, male elite How do the hostile conditions of visibility for women impact how these girls imagine their futures

Who Runs the World takes research into girlhood, leadership and visibility in a new critical direction. Drawing on research conducted with girls in schools and youth organizations, it investigates what girls apprehend leadership to mean both in their own lives and for women in the public eye. Research participants range from girls at elite independent schools to girls likely to be underrepresented due to their class, ethnicity, religion, ability, or sexuality. The book disrupts common assumptions around role models, in a context of cuts to youth provision and hostile media conditions for women leaders and celebrities. Who Runs the World is essential reading for anyone interested in gendered inequalities and in girls as audiences, citizens, and subjects of discourses of gender and power.

Reviews

This book represents an original and timely intervention in work on girls and celebrity culture, spotlighting how girls navigate the politics and possibilities of female leadership and its representation. Based on original audience research, it crucially complicates the simplicity of role model debates and deftly illuminates the complex intersections between female visibility, gender and power. -- Su Holmes, professor of TV Studies, University of East Anglia
Who Runs The World is a wonderful and fascinating read, combining media analysis and theoretical depth with lively excerpts from Paule and Yelins numerous interviews with schoolgirls throughout the UK. This excellent and important book pulls off the impressive double move of picking apart the neoliberal individualization of leadership fetishism whilst simultaneously analyzing the ongoing sexism and misogyny that pushes women out of spaces of power. -- Jo Littler, professor of Cultural, Media, and Social Analysis, Goldsmiths University of London
This groundbreaking book offers the first study of how girls themselves understand the widespread leadership initiatives and empowerment discourses aimed at them. The authors carefully analyze the way girls talk about public discourses on gender and power, their understandings of the misogyny women in public life face, and the risks of visibility. Paule and Yelin powerfully demonstrate how the language of leadership and empowerment, which dominate contemporary culture and feminism, is aimed at fixing girls rather than addressing the structural barriers that block them from reaching top positions. Who Runs The World is a must read for educators, policy makers, journalists, broadcasters, scholars and anyone concerned with addressing the intersecting inequalities that girls continue to face as they grow into women. -- Milly Williamson, vice-chair, Media Communications and Cultural Studies Association, Goldsmith University of London

Author Bio

Michele Paule is a Reader in Culture, Ge at Oxford Brookes University, UK.
Hannah Yelin is a Reader in Media and Culture at Oxford Brookes University, UK.