The journal entitled, "Dynamics and dilemmas of women leading women" by Bartunek, Walsh, and Lacey (2000) discussed one of the most critical and interesting scenarios that reflect the nature of women's leadership. In their article, the authors illustrated in their qualitative study how women leaders lead over women members-that is, women leading other women in an organization. .

             From the qualitative data, the authors generated one of the most important highlights of the study, which stated that "[t]he more leaders of women's groups.aim at fostering empowerment among group members, the more likely the group will experience ambivalence surrounding leadership." From this finding, it can be inferred that women as leaders, despite some effort to adopt a specific style of leadership (which is initiative-based), was dependent mainly on women members. The efficacy of women leaders, therefore, was dependent on the receptiveness of women members to the leader's initiative-based leadership.

             This study reflected how women as leaders may face difficulty in leading not because of their ineffectiveness as leaders, but mainly due to their gender-that is, being women who are also leaders. Women leaders become, in the process, ineffective as leaders because of the lack of receptivity to initiative by the members (as in the study's case, who are women members). Thus, the ineffectiveness of women as leaders is still dependent on their gender, and how their members associated the leaders' gender with specific expectations as to how women (or men) leaders should act and behave.