The last lecture begins with European statistics about the gender distribution in managerial position in various countries. Next, professor Lämsä points out an important point about the gender of the researcher – does it matter if the researcher is male or female. She continues this discussion by pointing out some of the most important female researchers in leadership and management. During this discussion she emphasizes the term ‘tokenism’ originally presented by Rosabeth Moss Kanter. She used the word tokens to refer to the relatively few women (or actually member of any minority) given prominent positions in a particular occupational setting.

After this segment, write some commentary to your own reflective report of the discussion questions about tokenism presented in last slide on page 3 on the hand-outs.

Next professor Lämsä introduces the main approaches in research on leadership and gender. The first one is “Gender-as-a-variable” perspective and the second is “The female standpoint” perspective and the third is “Gender construction perspective”. Linked to the previous, professor Lämsä also gives an example from a study made among Women managers in Russian business life.