Abstract
Despite global advances in gender equity, women in executive leadership continue to experience markedly shorter tenures than their male counterparts. This study interrogates the deep-rooted organisational, socio-cultural, and institutional forces that shape the longevity of women’s leadership in South Africa’s private sector. Set against a post-apartheid landscape that proclaims transformation yet sustains gendered hierarchies, the research explores how women executives interpret and negotiate their leadership experiences, agency, and identity within systems that both enable and constrain their tenure.
Grounded in Gendered Organisation Theory, Intersectionality, and Role Congruity Theory, the study investigates how structural design, cultural norms, and developmental access converge to sustain or curtail women’s executive trajectories. Employing a qualitative, Interpretative phenomenological approach (IPA), it captures the lived experiences of eight senior women executives who voluntarily exited their roles across multiple private-sector industries. Through iterative and rigorous interpretative analysis, the study exposes how the rhetoric of equality often conceals enduring masculine organisational codes, and how women construct meaning, legitimacy, and resilience amid these contradictions.
Findings reveal that leadership longevity is not a solitary achievement, but a relational outcome produced through the alignment of organisational architecture, cultural legitimacy, and developmental opportunity. The study extends Gendered Organisation Theory by illustrating how transformation discourse coexists with subtle masculine dominance; refines Role Congruity Theory by demonstrating the persistence of incongruity penalties; and introduces the novel construct of Relational Sustainability, which reframes women’s leadership longevity as a systemic and interdependent phenomenon rather than an individual endeavour.
While the study’s idiographic focus enriches interpretive depth, its scope is limited by a small, elite sample and cross-sectional design. These boundaries invite future research to pursue comparative, longitudinal, and mixed-method inquiries that test and expand the Refined Conceptual Framework, tracing how women’s leadership sustainability evolves across life stages, industries, and national contexts...