Women in Management and Leadership

There is a significant body of literature on women in management in Western countries (Ely and Padavich 2007). By comparison, the scholarship about the status and experiences of women in Africa is relatively small (Nkomo and Ngambi 2009). In a comprehensive search of eighteen electronic databases for the period 1990–2008, Nkomo and Ngambi (2009) found only forty-three publications that focused on ‘African’ women in management and leadership. ¹ The majority of the research was generally narrow in scope and relied on Western-based frameworks and understandings of gender and gender relations. The authors called for acceleration in the amount of knowledge production about African women in management and also pointed to the need for a comprehensive contextual framework that interrogated women's status and experiences within the economic, political and sociocul-tural context of contemporary Africa.