Abstract
Over the past decade, girls have been inundated with popular feminist exhortations to voice, confidence, and empowerment. Despite the luminosity of the ‘girl leader’ within public discourse, as an aspirational agent of change and a symbol of neoliberal cultural and consumer optimism, women remain under-represented in major decision-making roles across public life in the United Kingdom and beyond. Meanwhile, the raced, classed, and gendered contours of neoliberal austerity have eroded the very conditions which could otherwise promote women’s leadership, as the hollowing out of public youth services, combined with a lack of meaningful citizenship education, has limited girls’ and young women’s opportunities for community and civic engagement. Frustratingly, these constraints are evaded in the girl-focused ‘role model’ campaigns and initiatives that proliferate in the United Kingdom, which place the responsibility for developing girls’ aspirations to leadership on individual girls rather than structured, and structural, interventions and opportunities. Girls and young women’s claims to public voice and space, therefore, are both heavily regulated and constrained. It is within this context that Michele Paule and Hannah Yelin’s Who Runs the World? Girls, Leadership, and Women in the Public Eye (2024) skilfully attends to the complexities and contradictions of girls’ relationships to, and understandings of, gender, power, visibility, and the persistence of the gendered leadership gap.
Who Runs the World? is the culmination of years of UK-based fieldwork examining girls and media discourses surrounding gender and leadership (Paule and Yelin, 2020, 2021; Yelin and Paule, 2024). The book combines group interview data with feminist media analysis, discourse analysis, and social media research, although much of its empirical richness is borne from the former: from Paule and Yelin’s analysis of interview data generated in workshops with 94 teenage girls, aged 13–15, across 12 sites in England, Scotland, and Wales. Their research can be differentiated from comparable girlhood scholarship in its foregrounding of girls who do not already identify as feminists, activists, and/or future leaders (Biressi, 2018; Jackson, 2020; Taft, 2020). In addition, the girls featured throughout the book are socio-economically and regionally diverse, and Paule and Yelin intentionally attend to intersecting axes of gender, race, class, religion, disability, sexuality, and UK regionality throughout their analysis of the girls’ lives, experiences, and perspectives. Notably, in foregrounding the situated experiences of these girls, Who Runs the World? is shaped by an attentiveness to the ways in which neoliberal austerity, or ‘austere meritocracy’ (Mendick et al., 2018), has been unevenly experienced and interpreted by girls in the United Kingdom, inflecting how they imagine and understand power, opportunity, and women’s leadership. Paule and Yelin’s analysis subsequently resists the tokenisation of marginality that has characterised earlier studies of girlhood and leadership.
Their findings unfold across five chapters which attend to girls’ conceptualisations of power and leadership (chapter 1), the reductive logics of girl-oriented solutions to the gender leadership gap (chapter 2), girls’ negotiations of discourses of meritocracy and (inherited) privilege (chapter 3), popular girls’ leadership and empowerment campaigns (chapter 4), and girls’ and young women’s playful and participatory critiques of masculine leadership and state power during the COVID-19 pandemic (chapter 5). Across these chapters, they offer rich insight into the discursive positioning of girls with regards to mediated discourses of leadership, confidence, visibility, responsibility, aspiration, empowerment, and more. They also explore girls’ own responses to this material-discursive terrain, demonstrating the complexity, and at times the contradictions, of girls’ highly situated efforts to navigate the ‘exclusions and restrictions that shape their civic and political identities and aspirations’ (p. 32). In doing so, they seek to map the complex and messy roles that situated experience and media engagement play in girls’ interpellation by, negotiation of, and resistance to discourses surrounding gender, power, voice, and leadership.
Paule and Yelin offer a comprehensive critique of popular ‘role model’ campaigns and solutions aimed at girls. They argue that these campaigns fetishise representation (Finlayson, 2018), reproduce reductive gender-matching and media effects logics, and neglect to consider the fraught politics of visibility that inflect girls’ conceptions of leadership. For instance, while they note that girls place a high value on more relational and collaborative leadership models, they also emphasise that this was, pragmatically speaking, often viewed by girls as ‘providing a buffer against the pressure and exposure faced by individual women leaders’ (p. 111). This, they argue, reflects the impossibilities of popular feminist exhortations to girls’ voice and visibility ‘in a world [girls] know would punish them for that visibility’ (p. 124). They also emphasise that role model campaigns fail to recognise the broader range of cultural, social, and political spheres from which girls draw upon while formulating their conceptions of leadership. Their research was led by girls’ own preferred leaders, which often blur the lines between politics and celebrity, and the diverse and complex ways they respond to them. In this respect, their methods align with the central tenets of audience and reception research. One particular highlight here is chapter 3’s discussion of royal celebrity as a vector for girls to negotiate their understandings of work, inherited privilege (or lack thereof), stardom, and meritocracy, which builds upon Yelin’s earlier co-authored work on Meghan Markle (Clancy and Yelin, 2020; Yelin and Clancy, 2021).
The temporal specificity of Paule and Yelin’s fieldwork, which began before and concluded after COVID-19 pandemic restrictions in the United Kingdom, shapes the book in fascinating ways. While popular discourses about women and leadership have, since the 2008 financial crisis, long painted female leaders as saviour figures who will ‘rescue the world from the depredations of unbridled neoliberalism’ (p. 153), Paule and Yelin argue that these discourses intensified and mutated within the context of COVID-19. This provided an opportune moment for them as their fieldwork shifted to account for girls’ and young women’s digital engagements with, subversion of, and resistance to media discourses surrounding polarised gender roles, (in)competence, and pandemic-era leadership. This forms the basis of chapter 5, which brings together an analysis of ‘lockdown media’ (p. 123), including legacy news media and user-generated content on TikTok, with supplementary data from in-person workshops with girls following the re-opening of schools. In their analysis, they detail how girls and young women engaged in playful digital practices of impersonation, or ‘ventrolloquism’ (p. 141), to critique male leaders and the ‘absurdity of masculine leadership theatre’ (p. 146) throughout the pandemic.
While the girls in the study ultimately felt strongly about the need for positive social change, they struggled to engage in the ‘imaginative labour’ (p. 106) required to envision themselves as leaders of the future amid structural barriers, cultures of media misogyny, and intensifying intersecting axes of disadvantage and exclusion – all of which are rarely accounted for in popular girls’ empowerment and leadership campaigns and initiatives. Paule and Yelin subsequently call for better ways of working with girls in service of a ‘collectivist project with social justice at its heart’ (p. 119). While they close Who Runs the World? with an appeal to policymakers and media industry professionals to deliver on this, their foregrounding of girls’ perspectives and their critical interrogation of ‘the plethora of texts and initiatives that both claim to empower [girls] and exhort them to claim power’ (p. 153) will be of much scholarly interest to those in media and cultural studies, sociology, celebrity studies, and audience and reception studies who also want girls to feel like ‘future participation in public life is a safe possibility for them’ (p. 159).
