The boss

The appointment of women to corporate leadership positions in recent decades has been touted as the triumph of postfeminsm, or the integration of feminist empowerment and neoliberalism in the decades following the second wave feminist Women’s Movement. This article re-examines this narrative by analysing the way women were included in Australian corporate executive management from the 1980s to the 2010s. I argue that postfeminism facilitated major change in the composition of Australian corporate leadership, aligning women’s empowerment, their assumed ‘natural’ femininity, and the needs of Australia’s corporate economy at the turn of the millennium. Simultaneously, alignment between gender-based attributes and business success ‘cheapened’ executive women by funnelling them into feminised leadership portfolios and restricting them to corporate ‘housework’. The prevailing postfeminist culture then depoliticised gender inequality, with executive women distancing themselves from feminist activism, and internalising the belief that barriers to their success had been removed and that remaining inequalities could be resolved via personal optimisation. Illuminating the contemporary gender history of Australian corporations, this article concludes with the irony that postfeminism both placed executive women in positions to transform Australian corporations, and fundamentally prevented them from doing so

Boss · Classical mechanics · Economics · Inertia · Management · Physics · Sociology · Engineering · Gender Diversity and Inequality · Psychology · Mechanical Engineering

• Gatekeepers and hard hats

  Leticia Solace Naa Ayorkor Laryea, Linda Zusong Arezak et al.•Equal Opportunities International•2026

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