"Women and radio voices": Poster girls and daddy's girls: Interviewee collusion in the reification of gendered representations of leaders

The voice of public British radio a enjoys a vast worldwide audience, and one of its most long-standing and beloved programs is the biographical feature, Desert Island Discs. Since 1942, the BBC Radio 4 programme Desert Island Discs (DID) has provided first-order insights into life events that shape career choices. However, it is often asserted that the media misrepresents women professionals and leaders (Mavin et al., 2016). This study investigates the language and dynamic construction of business leaders’ representations of their personal and professional identities (DeRue and Ashford, 2010) and career choices through career life story interviews. Using Roberts’ (2005) personal image construction model as a framework, the study examines dialogic interactions between interviewer and interviewee that tease out or silence opportunities to contradict or to collude with gendered representation. We explore the co-construction of gendered meaning using content analysis methods (Gioia et al., 2013) with specific focus on interviewer framing, and analyse self-representations and interviewer questions of 20 female and 20 male interviewees in selected professional categories.