NORWEGIAN AND FRENCH WOMEN IN HIGH LEADERSHIP POSITIONS - THE IMPORTANCE OF CULTURAL CONTEXTS UPON GENDERED RELATIONS

This analysis of 50 French and Norwegian women in high positions of le adership stresses how gendered relations structuring private and profe ssional lives will vary in different cultures according to their socio -historical contexts. The specific contexts of two Western European de mocracies, France and Norway, reveal a number of differences impacting on the careers and the construction of the personal and social identi ties of women leaders. Interviews were held with French women who (a) assumed pioneering leadership positions in the 1970s (n = 10) and (b) who followed in the 1980s (n = 20) and with Norwegian women leaders (n = 20). Sixty percent of the total sample had held posts as cabinet or subcabinet ministers. Illustrations from their narratives, collected through semistructured interviews about their personal and professiona l itineraries, are used to discuss a number of questions from a compar ative cultural perspective: the sense of double marginality, extraneit y, lack of entitlement and vulnerability; role-model legitimation; fem inism and the women's movement; political parity/mixity; gender consci ousness and solidarity; and family and female-male interactions.