Conceptualizing leadership with respect to specific contexts is critically important because women leaders have been successful in certain contexts such as corporations and to some extent political systems while continue to lag in others such as science and engineering. Each of the contexts examined in this book offers a new and critically important perspective on women leaders. The purpose of this book is to analyze women's leadership in a number of different contexts that provide significantly different settings, demands and opportunities for women to lead. In 1996 few leadership researchers paid attention to the role and importance of context in leadership. However, in the intervening decade, scholars and practitioners alike have become sensitive to the importance of context, have identified specific leadership contexts such as organizations in crises or at the edge of chaos, have called for contextual theories of leadership acknowledging that leadership is always embedded in context.