Content area
Full Text
Introduction
The continued persistence of the glass ceiling (Corsun and Costen, 2001; Bendl and Schmidt, 2010), despite increasingly progressive social norms and decades of legal and organizational interventions, suggests that additional explanations of this phenomenon might be needed. One under-acknowledged, yet potentially powerful, contributor to the glass ceiling is the media’s portrayal of career women, when media imagery constitutes “material evidence of cultural fantasies, discourses, and realities” (Kaplan, 2004, p. 1,237). Indeed, strong evidence points to a wide-ranging media bias against women, one manifested in television and film (Myers, 2013; Bradley, 2013; Ellis, 2008), magazines (Massoni, 2004; Shuler, 2003), the news (Len-Ríos et al., 2005), commercials (Davies et al., 2005; Yoder et al., 2008), among others. These portrayals have been linked to “stereotype threat” whereby targets of biased representations will under-perform in, or avoid all together, career paths associated with threats to social norms (Davies et al., 2005; Woodcock et al., 2012). While the study of cultural interpretations of gender through media has a long history in academic research (Kitch, 1997; Mulvey, 1975), little is known about the portrayal of career women in contemporary entertainment films. This is unfortunate because fictional representations provide a legitimate lens from which to study management (Ellis, 2008) and women in management (O’Sullivan and Sheridan, 1999; Mavin et al., 2010). Focusing on films, I argue that negative portrayals of professional women can weaken women’s career aspirations and threaten the maintenance of a gender-diverse pipeline necessary to conquer the glass ceiling (Ragins et al., 1998; Helfat et al., 2006; McCarty Kilian et al., 2005).
Therefore, an exploratory study of these portrayals is needed to begin unpacking the process whereby the discourse around career women in film shapes real women’s career aspirations and contributes to the glass ceiling. This investigation draws on social role (Eagly, 1987), role congruity (Eagly and Karau, 2002), stereotype threat theories (Steele, 1997), as well as research on media influence (Mulvey, 1975) and the interpretation of films as social texts (O’Sullivan and Sheridan, 1999; Turner, 2006), to accomplish three goals: First, I conduct a broad thematic exploration of the portrayal of career women in Hollywood films, focusing on negative and stereotype-threatening depictions. Second, I draw on stereotype threat research...