Dr. Mario's 2nd 🧠

Are Leader Stereotypes Masculine. A Meta-Analysis of Three Research Paradigms

4 min read

rw-book-cover

Metadata

Highlights

The Importance of Stereotypes to Women’s Access to Leadership

…a survey of 705 women at the vice president level and above in Fortune 1,000 corporations found that 72% agreed or strongly agreed that “stereotypes about women’s roles and abilities” are a barrier to women’s advancement to the highest levels (Wellington, Kropf, & Gerkovich, 2003). (View Highlight)

…women are the targets of two forms of prejudice against them as leaders: a deficit in the ascription of leadership ability to them and, compared to that of men, a less favorable evaluation of their agentic leadership behavior. In other words, descriptively, women seem less usual or natural in most leadership roles; and prescriptively, women often seem inappropriate or presumptuous when they display the agentic behavior often required by these roles (see also Burgess & Borgida, 1999). (View Highlight)

Three Paradigms for Examining the Masculinity of Leader Roles

  • Think manager—think male (Schein 1973): direct test of the similarity of leader stereotypes to male and female stereotypes.
  • Agency—communion: rating leader behaviors on separate masculine (agentic) and femenine (communal) scales.
  • Masculinity—femininity: a test of masculine versus feminine content of occupational stereotypes, with some being leadership positions.

Variation in Stereotypes About Men, Women, and Leaders

Eagly and Karau (2002) hypothesized that the incongruity between leader stereotypes and the female gender stereotype is not fixed but varies with change in either stereotype. This meta-analysis examines several factors hypothesized to influence this incongruity. (View Highlight)

A shift in an androgynous direction would ease women’s role incongruity problem in relation to leader roles. Why might role incongruity have lessened? Organizational experts have often argued that definitions of good managerial practices have changed in response to features of the contemporary organizational environment, such as fast social and technological change and unprecedented complexity of organizations’ missions and contexts (e.g., Avolio, 1999; Kanter, 1997; Lipman-Blumen, 2000). According to such analyses, these changed conditions compromise the efficacy of top-down command-and-control leadership and foster democratic relationships, participatory decision-making, delegation, and team-based leadership skills (e.g., Gergen, 2005; Kanter, 1997; Lipman-Blumen, 2000; McCauley, 2004). Such descriptions are manifestly less masculine than many traditional models of good leadership. (View Highlight)

Evidence that the mere presence of more women leaders can change perceptions of leader roles emerged in research on women’s occupancy of the chief village councilor role in West Bengal (Beaman, Chattopadhyay, Duflo, Pande, & Topalova, 2009) (View Highlight)

What about change in gender stereotypes? If gender stereotypes reflect the differing placements of men and women into social roles (Wood & Eagly, 2010), women’s increase in labor force participation (to 61% vs. 33% in 1950; U.S. Department of Labor, 2010a) and in leader roles might predict change in the female stereotype. (View Highlight)

Discussion

All three paradigms showed that stereotypes of leaders are decidedly masculine. Specifically, people viewed leaders as quite similar to men but not very similar to women, as more agentic than communal, and as more masculine than feminine.

The two things at the same time that đź“– The myth of the nice girl advises:

…that they should be agentic to fulfill the leader role but communal to fulfill the female gender role. Thus, although women leaders may be seen as competent, women who disregard their communal gender role are often disliked and therefore still the recipients of prejudice even though they fulfill their leader role (Rudman & Glick, 1999, 2001).

And be careful:

a double bind that discourages women from presenting themselves in ways that others consider too masculine or too feminine (Eagly & Carli, 2007), constraining their behavior to an androgynous middle

New highlights added 2023-02-15

All three paradigms showed that stereotypes of leaders are decidedly masculine. Specifically, people viewed leaders as quite similar to men but not very similar to women, as more agentic than communal, and as more masculine than feminine. (View Highlight)

t men, but not women, devalued women’s leadership in exper- imental studies that held constant all leader characteristics other than their sex (View Highlight)

that they should be agentic to fulfill the leader role but communal to fulfill the female gender role. Thus, although women leaders may be seen as competent, women who disregard their communal gender role are often disliked and therefore still the recipients of prejudice even though they fulfill their leader role (Rudman & Glick, 1999, 2001). (View Highlight)

a double bind that discourages women from presenting themselves in ways that others consider too masculine or too feminine (Eagly & Carli, 2007), constraining their behavior to an androgynous middle (View Highlight)

Graph View

Backlinks