books. For this, it was tallied how often male/female respondents listed
males/females. Table 2.3 presents the number of male and female leaders
mentioned by male and female informants.
Both men and women mention more men than women as leaders. This is
confirmed by a Chi-square test (ChiSq (2). = 10.26, p < .001). So for the
mentioning of leaders, the gender bias is clearly there: male informants
mention male leaders relatively more often than female leaders, though
female informants also mention men relatively more often as leaders than
women. The data seem to show that Elana Shohamy is right in the sense that
men tend to list more men as leaders than women, but women also mention
more men. So yes, men stick with men but so do women.
Heidi Byrnes sees another difference between men and women:“Women are
less attached to one paradigm and more willing to change and seek new ways.
They tend to be more issue-driven than theory-driven.”Since there was not
a specific question on this and the issue emerged too late to include it in the
interviews, my data do not provide answers on this issue.
2.4 Race
AL is largely a white enterprise with more recently a growth of the number of
researchers from Asia. Many of them do doctoral work at English-speaking
universities, though there are centers like Singapore, Hong Kong, Guanzhou
and Xi’an in China where significant work in AL is being done. As mentioned
earlier, the coverage of areas outside the English-speaking world and western
Europe is very limited. The lack of representation from these regions may be
areflection of the problems researchers in those areas have to get their arti-
cles and books published and their grant applications accepted: problems
concerning a lack of knowledge of academic English, but also the highly
restrictive definition of academic English by journal reviewers and editors. In
general, race is a complex issue that is rarely addressed in AL research, it
seems. There is a remarkable lack of Afro-Americans working in thisfield.
Finding out why that is, would be another study.
2.5 Age
No information was asked about the informants’age, but many mentioned
the year of their graduating which provides some clues about age (and at
least one refused to tell the date of his graduation because that might
Table 2.3Gender effects in listing leaders in thefield
Male leaders Female leadersMale informants 575 291
Female informants 345 230
Total 920 521
The informants 13