Who Runs the World?: Girls, Leadership, and Women in the Public Eye

What do teenage girls think of leadership when power is concentrated amongst the white, male elite? How do the hostile conditions of visibility for women impact how these girls imagine their futures?

Who Runs the World? takes research into girlhood, leadership and visibility in a new critical direction. Drawing on research conducted with girls in schools and youth organizations, it investigates what girls apprehend leadership to mean both in their own lives and for women in the public eye. Research participants range from girls at elite independent schools to girls likely to be underrepresented due to their class, ethnicity, religion, ability, or sexuality. The book disrupts common assumptions around ’role models’, in a context of cuts to youth provision and hostile media conditions for women leaders and celebrities. Who Runs the World? is essential reading for anyone interested in gendered inequalities and in girls as audiences, citizens, and subjects of discourses of gender and power.

Michele Paule is a Senior Lecturer in Culture, Media and Education at Oxford Brookes University, UK.

Hannah Yelin is a Senior Lecturer in Media and Culture at Oxford Brookes University, UK.