A literature review on women’s experience in their leadership careers

This paper aims to provide a timely answer to the recent call for a rapprochement among separate theoretical streams that characterize the literature on women leadership and career advancement, delineating the discussion about the barriers to women’s progression and the conditions under which these obstacles can be overcome. Relying on the novel methodology of topic modeling, we inductively conceptualize 12 topic-based themes that have marked the academic debate in the last decades. In interpreting the topics landscape that emerged, we adopt a multi-level perspective, aggregating the topics into three levels of analysis: individual, organizational and societal level. The fine-grained conceptualization of the topics contributes to systematize separate streams of research and to emphasize the multi-level nature of the women’s leadership career journey. Through the discussion of the contributions and limitations identified at each level of analysis and across levels, we provide recommendation for future research