When I first was approached by SAGE about my willingness to undertake this project, my initial thought was “What a great idea!” I recently had contributed to George Goethals, Georgia Sorenson, and James Burns's four-volume Encyclopedia of Leadership. I believed that the time was right to develop such a resource exclusively on women's leadership. With a background in political science as well as the law, I envisioned that this would be a fun and fairly easy enterprise. Was I ever wrong. Although I had edited the journal Women & Politics for 4 years and hosted two leadership conferences at the Women & Politics Institute at American University, the breadth of work being done on women's leadership and leadership studies more generally was astonishing.

A handbook on women's leadership, in theory, should begin with a definition of leadership. To find one definition that could satisfy all the authors in this handbook would be impossible. Everyone from the popular press to academics seem to have turned their attention to issues of, and questions surrounding, leadership. Many definitions are coached in actions leaders take or how they take them. Many other works are stories of leaders with lessons to be drawn from the performance of certain people in certain situations. Moreover, certain disciplines, as well as the development of leadership as a field of study itself, as a freestanding department or center for the study or action, further complicate the development of grand theory in this area.

Each section in this handbook, in fact, begins with an overview of leadership questions that have been or are still being tackled in every field where the study of women, as women, is important. And, interestingly, as it turned out, this handbook has largely become a handbook written by women. Of the 101 full entries included here, upward of 90% were written by women. In that, this may be the first such comprehensive undertaking to identify the debates within various disciplines, capture factors believed key to leadership, and locate where women leaders have been or are now found from a woman's perspective. Thus, national surveys of leaders, surveys to identify leaders, and analyses of leadership styles must always be analyzed with an eye to the chances for women's leadership to be underappreciated or ignored altogether. The depth of work in this handbook proves that complaints that “there is no literature on,” or no reason to examine, women's leadership can no longer be sustained. Stories of great women that have been lost over time are found in many of these chapters.

Within these chapters, written by experts across fields all over the globe, leadership is approached from myriad perspectives. None is “right” or “wrong.” All offer useful insights from experts within areas and often come to different conclusions about leadership. In the context of the key role leaders play in all facets of human activity, moreover, those who are labeled as leaders can play an extraordinarily important role in constructing views of leadership.

In 2009 U.S. News & World Report published its annual list of leaders compiled in conjunction with the Harvard University School of Business. Of those experts on “leaders” or “leadership” consulted, 27 of 37 (73%) had direct or indirect associations with Harvard. Only 30% of the evaluators were women. Thus, from the beginning, “who” were identified as leaders sang, in the notable words of political scientist E. E. Schattschneider, not only with “an upperclass bias” but with a male one too. The selection team also produced a list of leaders in which one often had to mine deep down into the trenches of local or community leadership to “find” a woman leader. Surprisingly, at least to me, these experts failed to recognize logical leaders such as the Speaker of the House of Representatives, the Honorable Nancy Pelosi, or Associate Justice Sandra Day O'Connor. One, in fact, could argue that as the swing justice on the Supreme Court of the United States for many years, O'Connor not only set national policy but decided the presidency of the United States in 2000. No doubt my background and training bring those two notable absences to mind much the way Brad Pitt fans get upset when People magazine fails to name him “Sexiest Man of the Year,” but honestly, how do you look at leadership and not include the leader of the U.S. House of Representatives?

Although I was not aware of it at the time, after reading thousands of pages on women, women leaders, and characteristics of women leaders, several themes became apparent quickly and appeared in most of the entries. [Page xiv]Whether in a part overview, individual chapter, or a Spotlight on an individual woman, one of at least four factors emerged in each entry:

• 1.
  Most of history is still HIStory. Achievements of women simply were not recorded or deemed important by chroniclers of events. I have never learned more in a 2-year period than I did in editing and writing for this handbook. Finding out about women still takes extra digging into primary source materials or careful collection of data from multiple sources. I am grateful to all of the contributors who took their tasks so seriously to provide us with important new insights on women's leadership and for hundreds of suggestions for future research to continue to put women's accomplishments in a more thoughtful light.
• 2.
  A woman's voice does not a chorus make. Simply having one woman in a position of leadership does not mean that women will be welcome into leadership positions in a company, as an administrator or as a president. Margaret Thatcher was an effective leader but did little to foster women into positions of leadership. In sharp contrast, Speaker Pelosi has gone out of her way to position women as committee chairs, subcommittee chairs, and in leadership positions. Moreover, for women to have an impact on leadership, usually some critical mass must be met.
• 3.
  Woman not only speak in a different voice, but their voices are heard differently. A significant body of research exists that documents that women not only speak differently than do men, but often lead differently, too. Part of this difference stems from difference in tone and presentation. This, in turn, leads many men to view women as less visionary, which many leadership theorists see as key to explaining why women are perceived as weaker leaders. Thus, who defines the terms and their components can have a significant outcome on any leadership study.
• 4.
  We are far from approaching equality for women as leaders or in leadership positions. This handbook ends with a discussion of Hillary Rodham Clinton's unsuccessful bid for the U.S. presidency and a discussion of what can be done to “fix” leadership gaps. But, nearly every chapter in this handbook, or at least one within a section, notes the way that women have to go to be recognized as or become leaders. Whether it is politics, the arts, within social movements, or the professions, women consistently lag behind men in almost all areas except those related to women's caring functions such as education or nursing.

I would never have undertaken this enterprise if I had had any idea of the time it would take. Natalie Greene started working on this project when she was an undergraduate at American University enrolled in its Women, Policy, and Political Leadership Certificate Program. By the time this work is published, she will have nearly completed her master's degree in library science. I could not have finished this project without her assistance. She has been enormously patient with me—only asking me at least 100 times, “Where is Margaret Sanger?” (a reference to the last Spotlight/chapter completed). She has cheerfully searched for, asked, pleaded, and at times even threatened the authors commissioned to write these chapters. The paperwork and tracking involved in this endeavor were daunting, and Natalie took it all on with her usual brilliance and aplomb. She also has been a wonderful colleague who has shared similar moments of panic when we realized that certain topics were not included in this handbook. I will leave it to readers to discern those omissions. Some were in areas for which we simply could not find authors. Others were ones that come out of nowhere, seem obvious, but we just missed the topic.

I would also be remiss if I failed to mention the support of William M. LeoGrande, Dean of the School of Public Affairs at American University, as well as the help of my talented and knowledgeable editorial board (whose names are listed in the credits).

As a control freak, I personally edited each of these entries—some that came in at 9,000 to 12,000 words—way over the SAGE limit of 5,000 to 7,000 words. To all of the authors who may believe they were overedited, I apologize. But, I think that these efforts, combined with Natalie's and those of the editors at SAGE, have allowed us to produce a body of scholarship that can move the field forward much in the way that James MacGregor Burns's Leadership did in 1978.