Barriers, Enablers, and Strategies: Women's Experiences of Advancing to Leadership in Mexican and Swedish SMEs

Sammanfattning

Background. SMEs employ a large share of the global workforce but remain under-studied in gender and leadership research. Because SMEs often rely on informal governance, limited HR systems, and personalised authority, women's advancement may differ from those in large bureaucratic organisations. Women remain under-represented in management in both Mexico and Sweden, while national averages can hide variation by firm size, sector and seniority. Purpose. This study examines how women navigate managerial career paths in SMEs in Mexico and Sweden, and how organisational practices, workplace interactions, and cultural institutional expectations shape those paths. It moves beyond listing barriers to analysing the informal organisational processes through which gender shapes leadership advancement. Method. We conducted twelve semi-structured interviews with women in middle management positions, seven in Mexico and five in Sweden. Each interview was analysed using reflexive thematic analysis, then compared across cases through theory-informed interpretive comparison to develop four interpretive pathways. The study is grounded in social role theory and role congruity theory, with institutional theory as an interpretive lens. Conclusion. The study developed a four-path interpretive framework showing how institutional context, gendered social structures, and individual agency shaped women’s advancement. In the Mexican cases, gendered disadvantage is shaped mainly by institutional informality; while one cooperative case suggested partial formalisation can make promotion decisions more accountable. In the Swedish cases, formal equality coexisted with micro-inequities, emotional labelling, care-related assumptions, visibility gaps, and socially learned self-doubt. Across both contexts, sponsorship and pay-it-forward leadership appeared as a recurring pattern. Overall, women navigated barriers through structurally conditioned agency, using strategies that helped them advance but not resolve the underlying conditions.