A Phenomenological Study of Gender and the Leadership of Female Academic Library Directors

The purpose of this phenomenological study was to explore how the gender of female academic library directors affects their leadership. The theory guiding this study was Acker’s theory of the ideal worker, as it offers a framework for examining the impact of worker gender in the workplace. The central research question of this study examined how the gender of female library directors at medium nonprofit private universities and colleges in the U.S. affected their leadership. This study utilized a phenomenological approach, conducting semi-structured interviews of female academic library directors at medium nonprofit private universities and colleges in the U.S. The results were then analyzed via data coding to identify major themes across the participants’ lived experiences. The study resulted in four major themes: (a) Relationships, (b) Service Orientation, (c) Identity, and (d) Emotional Labor. Overall, the identified themes center around women’s lived experiences as communally-oriented leaders. Although this offers career satisfaction to these female leaders, it also puts them in the conflicting position of being expected to align with the agentic ideal leader paradigm on a university-wide level while being rewarded for behaving communally on a library level.