South Korean Women Leaders’ Resistance to their Token Status in the Workplace: A Typology Development

Abstract: We have conducted research on Korean women leaders to examine the challenges they face in the gendered workplace where organizational constraints and traditional values coexist over the decade. We have interviewed almost 200 women leaders in diverse sectors (e.g., business) from the perspective of work-life balance, leadership development, and career development and success in eight qualitative studies (Cho et al., 2015, Cho et al., 2016, Cho et al., 2017, Cho et al., 2019, Cho et al., 2020; Cho et al., 2021; Cho et al., 2023; Han et al., 2018). Most recently, we reanalyzed 107 narratives of women leaders from the lens of tokenism theory (Kanter, 1977), using the secondary analysis of qualitative data: due to their token status in the workplace, a majority of women leaders assimilated to the dominant male group’s expectations but a few managed to resist in their own way to bring in culture change in the organization (Cho et al., 2021). We were delighted to finally see this positive finding as research on tokenism in Western contexts heavily concentrates on debunking the challenges token women face but did not pay attention to how those women resisted the status quo by going their own way. This positive outlook of the study motivated us to conduct research on token women leaders’ resistance to examine how they resisted their token status to create new norms that can be cascaded to women in the leadership pipeline.
In this context, the purpose of this study is to develop a typology of women leaders’ resistance to their token status in the organization, using ideal-type analysis.
Before going through the seven steps of ideal type analysis, we reviewed the literature on women leaders’ resistance (see Table 1). Cho et al. (2021) presented three themes of resistance: rejecting stereotypes, going one’s own way, and creating new norms from 107 narratives of Korean women leaders, while Park et al. (2020) added sub-themes to three major themes of resistance in Cho et al. (2021). Chaudhary and Dutt (2022), from interviews with 13 women leaders, offered six themes. From interviews with 14 Saudi women leaders, Jamjoom and Mills (2023) presented five types of resistance.
Based on the review of the literature, we aim at developing a typology of women leaders’ resistance in this study. To that end, we chose 200 narratives that were collected from eight past qualitative studies to work through the seven steps of typology development. After getting familiarized with 200 narratives, we are going through the second step: writing the case reconstructions, and we independently wrote 10 case reconstructions out of 10 select narratives as directed and discussed discrepancies to reach consensus. For the next steps, we formed two teams of pairs so that a team member will follow steps, while the other member will check if the process is going in the right direction. All of us will meet at a time when a decision should be made in a collective way. To check the credibility of the process, we will solicit an independent researcher. As a result of ideal type analysis, we expect to present a typology of Korean women leaders’ resistance to their token status.
From the preliminary analysis of 10 narratives, we identified the types of resistance indicated in Cho et al. (2021), Park et al. (2020), and Jamjoom and Mills (2023). However, we also discovered types of resistance that extant literature did not address or classify, such as some women leaders’ tendency to endure as opposed to going against the norms. Given that extant research has not yet reached an agreement on the typology of women leaders’ resistance, this study, therefore, will contribute to research on women in leadership in a fourfold way: first, this study will be the first tryout in HRD research to show the possibility of an untapped exploration in qualitative research using ideal type analysis; second, the typology presented will add explanatory power to Kanter’s tokenism theory by presenting how women leaders use resistance as a coping strategy to create opportunities as leaders in the organization; third, the typology will illustrate how women leaders use resistance to overcome challenges within male-dominated organizations, with particular consideration of the unique cultural context of Korea; and lastly, the typology of women leaders’ resistance can be used for the development of women in leadership pipeline in ways that show how they can strike a balance between their efforts to survive in the organization and their awareness of going their own way to bring in change in the organization.