  Women have been shown to be effective leaders in many team-based situations.
However, it is also well-recognized that women are underrepresented in
engineering and technology areas, which leads to wasted efforts and a lack of
diversity in professional organizations. Although studies about gender and
leadership are rich, research focusing on engineering-specific activities, are
scarce. To react on this gap, we explored the experience of female leaders of
software development projects and possible context factors that influence
leadership effectiveness. The study was conducted as a longitudinal multiple
case study. Data was collected from survey, interviews, observation and project
reports. In this work, we reported some preliminary findings related to
leadership style, team perception on leadership and team-task context factors.
We found a strong correlation between perceived team leadership and task
management. We also observed a potential association between human-oriented
leading approach in low customer involvement scenarios and task-oriented
leading approach in high customer involvement situations.
