Rethinking Leadership Emergence in the Workplace
Shani Pupco studies the forces that shape leadership emergence. Why some people are seen as leaders before they ever hold a title, and why others are not, is what drives her work.
Why do fathers ascend as leaders at work after having kids, while mothers fall behind? What role does menstruation play in how women are perceived as leaders? How does parental leave shape who gets promoted? These are the threads Shani has been pulling on since graduate school.
Shani joined the Sprott School of Business as an Assistant Professor of Management. Her research focuses on leadership emergence, exploring not just who formally holds a title, but who gets perceived as a leader in the first place, and how gender shapes that perception at every turn. “We’ve seen improvements over time in terms of gender equity in organizations,” she says. “But I think we got a little comfortable. Seeing more female leaders publicly, some might have assumed the inequity had gone. It’s just manifested in different ways.”
Her path to this research is driven by real-world experience. During her undergrad, Shani worked in daycares and family resource centres, often interacting with new mothers who were recently back to work. She wasn’t a mother herself at the time, but she listened and noticed a pattern. These women needed somewhere to put down what they were carrying. That stayed with her throughout her academic career.
When she got to graduate school, she began connecting those early observations to the research on how women are treated at work. She’s been building on that connection ever since.
Shani’s dissertation examined how parenthood affects leadership emergence differently by gender. What she found supports what many working parents already suspect. Fatherhood tends to help men at work, while motherhood tends to hold women back. “For so long, people asked women: why do you expect to ascend in the workplace? You’re taking leave,” she says. “But fathers are taking leave too, and they’re ascending.”
Now she wants to understand why. Her current data collection is focused on parental leave and the dynamics that unfold. One preliminary finding stands out: supervisors are more likely to stay in contact with men while they’re on leave. This sounds minor but being kept in the loop and staying visible may be what positions someone for a promotion when they return. Women aren’t receiving those check-ins at the same rate.
Shani’s research doesn’t stop at parenthood. She and colleagues recently submitted a grant application to study how menstrual disorders affect women’s leadership emergence. It’s an area that’s rarely studied, she says, and that invisibility is part of the problem.
Leadership, in one form or another, runs through all of her work. A recently published paper she co-authored with colleagues from the University of Ottawa, Queen’s, and Concordia examined how surgeon behaviour in the operating room can shape team attitudes and patient outcomes. She’s also a collaborator on research looking at how the type of employment contract a worker holds influences the resources and attention they receive from their managers.
What Shani wants people to take away from her research is that progress has happened, but it’s easy to mistake visibility for equity. Seeing women in leadership doesn’t mean the barriers are gone. It often just means they’ve moved.
Shani is also clear about where responsibility sits. It’s not on individual women to figure out how to navigate workplaces that weren’t designed for them. What companies communicate can matter less than how they actually treat people once they’re in the door. “Things can change once you’re in an organization, depending on the signals that you receive from that organization.”
The patterns she keeps finding are consistent and under-researched. While fathers get promoted faster after having kids, mothers returning from leave do not. Menstrual health might shape workplace participation in ways that aren’t being measured. The visibility of progress has made it easy to overlook the problems that remain. However, Shani’s work is a reminder that those problems didn’t just go away. They just got harder to identify.