Leadership Research Summary:
- Although leader role expectations appear to have become relatively more compatible with stereotypically feminine attributes like empathy, women continue to be highly underrepresented in leadership roles. The study posits that one reason for this disparity is that, whereas stereotypically feminine traits are appreciated as nice “add-ons” for leaders, it is stereotypically masculine attributes that are valued as the defining qualities of the leader role, especially by men (who are often the gatekeepers to these roles). The study assessed men’s and women’s idea of a great leader with a focus on gendered attributes in two studies using different methodologies. In Study 1, researchers employed a novel paradigm in which participants were asked to design their “ideal leader” to examine the potential trade-off between leadership characteristics that were more stereotypically masculine (i.e., agency) and feminine (i.e., communality).
- Results showed that communality was valued in leaders only after meeting the more stereotypically masculine requirements of the role (i.e., competence and assertiveness), and that men in particular preferred leaders who were more competent (vs. communal), whereas women desired leaders who kept negative stereotypically masculine traits in check (e.g., arrogance). In Study 2, researchers conducted an experiment to examine men’s and women’s beliefs about the traits that would be important to help them personally succeed in a randomly assigned leader (vs. assistant) role, allowing us to draw a causal link between roles and trait importance. Researchers found that both men and women viewed agentic traits as more important than communal traits to be a successful leader. Together, both studies make a valuable contribution to the social psychological literature on gender stereotyping and bias against female leaders and may illuminate the continued scarcity of women at the very top of organizations, broadly construed
Leadership Research Implications and Findings:
- The findings from this investigation may illuminate the continued scarcity of women at the very top of organizations, broadly construed (Eagly and Heilman, 2016; Catalyst, 2018). Overall, across studies, both women and men saw communality as relatively unimportant for successful leadership. These traits, however, make women particularly well suited to occupy low status positions (Study 2), which may contribute to gender segregation (Blau et al., 2013) via women’s self-selection into low status roles (Diekman and Eagly, 2008; Schneider et al., 2016).
- On a more positive note, our results also suggest that women may be more supportive than men of leaders who exhibit more feminine leadership styles. We found as we had expected that women showed higher appreciation for communal attributes in leaders in comparison to men (Study 1). Furthermore, in Study 1the researchers also examined participants’ interest in minimizing negative traits stereotypically associated with men and women when designing their ideal leader. Rather than desiring leaders to possess lower amounts of negative traits that are more stereotypically feminine (such as emotional; Shields, 2013), participants desired leaders to lack negative traits more commonly associated with men (like arrogance; Prentice and Carranza, 2002), and this preference was stronger among women compared to men.
- Whereas many studies have assumed to some extent that descriptive gender and leader stereotypes are similarly shared by men and women (see review by Rudman and Phelan, 2008), the study’s results suggest that this assumption needs to be reconsidered, particularly with respect to gender traits that are relevant to leadership. Even when men and women agreed on the attributes they would personally need to be successful leaders (Study 2), Study 1 showed that women ideally prefer leaders who are more communal relative to men, and that they feel more negative than men about certain aspects believed to characterize both men and leaders (arrogance).
- These subtle gender differences in leader-role expectations dovetail past investigations showing patterns consistent with gender in-group favoritism effects (Tajfel et al., 1971; Greenwald and Pettigrew, 2014) on evaluation of female and male authorities (Eagly et al., 1992; Norris and Wylie, 1995; Deal and Stevenson, 1998; Ayman et al., 2009; Kwon and Milgrom, 2010; Bosak and Sczesny, 2011; Paustian-Underdahl et al., 2014; Vial et al., 2018). For example, past studies have revealed that women have more positive attitudes toward female authorities compared to men, whether implicit (Richeson and Ambady, 2001) or explicit (Rudman and Kilianski, 2000). Similarly, a recent investigation revealed that female employees working for female supervisors tend to respect those supervisors more so than male employees and engage in positive work behaviors more frequently than male employees when working for a woman (Vial et al., 2018).
- Overall, the two studies reported here further suggest that women might be relatively more supportive of leaders with more communal leadership styles compared to men. Thus, while it may be too soon to tell whether these stereotypically feminine traits will indeed define the leaders of the 21st century (Gerzema and D’Antonio, 2013), the investigation suggests that women might be more willing than men to embrace this trend.