Roundtable/Book Launch Event: Women and Leadership in the European Union

Abstract

Launching at the next European Conference on Politics and Gender, this event will join in with a dialogue on women’s access to and exercise of leadership at the helm of the European Union. Although Ursula von der Leyen and Christine Lagarde became the first female presidents of the European Commission and the European Central Bank in 2019, respectively, the increase in female politicians, managers and experts in the institutions of the European Union has been a more long-term and incremental development—obtaining much less public and academic attention. Against this background, the forthcoming volume “Women and Leadership in the European Union” (Oxford University Press, March 2022) presents the first collection of research dedicated to the study of women’s leadership in the European Union. Integrated into a coherent analytical framework, chapters study women’s positional leadership, i.e. their pathways to leadership positions across the EU institutions, as well as their behavioral leadership in the variety of EU positions, i.e. the exercise of political, administrative, and expert leadership. The discussions of this roundtable will show how the chapters in the book deepen understanding of the structural opportunities and challenges that the EU institutions pose for women as well as the significant role that women play in European governance and politics, thereby considering the state of gender equality in the European Union and European integration, more broadly.

Title	Details
Rhetoric and Leadership: A Comparison of Female Vice-Presidents of the European Commission (1999-2019)	View Paper Details
Searching for Agency: Gendering Leadership in European Integration Theory	View Paper Details
Theresa May's Leadership in Brexit Negotiations: Self-Representation and Media Evaluations	View Paper Details