Gender and Leadership. Gary N. Powell
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many colleagues in professional associations – the Gender and Diversity in Organizations Division (formerly Women in Management Division) and the Careers Division of the Academy of Management, the Gender in Management Special Interest Group of the British Academy of Management, and the Work and Family Researchers Network – for providing both a forum for the sharing of research findings and a stimulus for creative thinking on this topic.
The School of Business at the University of Connecticut, for its ongoing support over the course of my academic career.
Ruth Stitt at Sage Publications, for being an engaged, encouraging, and supportive editor.
Mosey the Cat, for unlimited love, affection, and play.
Laura Graves, for standing by me all the way.
1 Why Are We Talking about the Linkage between Gender and Leadership?
This book represents an extended essay on the state of knowledge regarding the linkage between gender and leadership. It is intended to provide a personal perspective on as well as an overview of issues regarding gender and leadership. It is also intended to provide a useful resource to both scholars who are subject specialists, and scholars and students who have an interest in this topic. It draws upon research on gender and leadership conducted worldwide in several disciplines, including management and organizational behavior, human resource management, psychology, sociology, economics, communications, and gender studies.
The linkage between gender and leadership, which historically has favored men and disadvantaged women, is troubling and problematic from an equal opportunity and social justice perspective. It has been a major topic of interest in the broader literature on gender issues in the workplace that has significantly grown since the 1970s (e.g., Acker, 1990; Alvesson & Due Billing, 2009; Bartol, 1978; Broadbridge & Hearn, 2008; Broadbridge & Simpson, 2011; Calás & Smircich, 1996; Davidson & Cooper, 1992; Elliott & Stead, 2008; Kanter, 1977; Kumra et al., 2014; Marshall, 1984; Mavin et al., 2014; Ryan & Haslam, 2005; Vinnicombe et al., 2013), including edited volumes of classic articles (e.g., Gatrell et al., 2010).
Nonetheless, the book arrives at a time when some have speculated that “gender fatigue” (Joshi et al., 2015, p. 1466), or weariness with researching gender issues in the workplace, has set in among scholars. Such fatigue, if it exists, may be a response to the marginalization or de-legitimation of scholarship on gender-related issues by other scholars who find them unworthy of interest (Jané et al., 2018). Gender fatigue may also arise from what has been called a “postfeminist sensibility” at work (Gill et al., 2017, p. 226). According to this sensibility, gender inequalities existed in the past (not in the present); gender inequalities occur elsewhere (not in my place of work); being a woman is an advantage (not a disadvantage); and, if any gender inequalities exist, that's just the way the workplace is and it needs to be accepted (Gill et al., 2017). In short, a postfeminist sensibility suggests that “the problem of gender has been ‘solved’” as much as it ever needed to be solved (Broadbridge & Simpson, 2011, p. 475).
However, rest assured that you will find no gender fatigue in this corner. Indeed, I feel that we as scholars are, or should be, just getting warmed up in examining the linkage between gender and leadership because (1) even though it may have evolved, this linkage persists; and (2) it has serious consequences for individuals, organizations, and the conduct of work.
Further, heightened and sustained public interest in the linkage between gender and leadership begs our attention as scholars. For example, in recent years, extensive media attention has been devoted to the periodic rise and fall of the small number of female CEOs of large corporations (e.g., Zarya, 2018), the appropriate role of masculinity in leadership given the “hyper-masculine” leadership style of Donald Trump as US president (Powell et al., 2018) and the release of guidelines for counselors regarding the mental health hazards of expecting males to be highly masculine (American Psychological Association, 2018), and rampant sexual harassment by male top executives directed towards women seeking employment or advancement (e.g., Kantor & Twohey, 2017) and the emergence of a #MeToo Movement in response (e.g., Peters & Besley, 2019); new examples are regularly arising. Popular interest in this topic remains strong and shows no signs of going away. As the book describes in detail, important issues regarding the linkage between gender and leadership that draw considerable public attention continue to warrant our attention as scholars.
In this chapter, I first offer my perspective on some of the issues that arise when examining gender as a construct and group differences on the basis of gender. Next, I describe how I became involved in examining the topic of gender and leadership and how my answer to the question posed in the chapter's title has evolved over four decades of researching and writing about it. Finally, I introduce specific research questions regarding the linkage between gender and leadership to be addressed in the next four chapters, with a conclusions chapter to follow.
On Examining Gender and Gender Differences
First, I wish to explain my choice of terminology on the gender side of the gender-leadership linkage. (On the leadership side of this linkage, I use the terms “leader” and “manager” interchangeably as in the leadership literature.) Some scholars distinguish between sex and gender (e.g., Archer & Lloyd, 2002; Lippa, 2005; Unger, 1979). When this distinction is made, the term “sex” is used to refer to the demographic characteristic that is associated with biological characteristics of individuals such as their physiological properties and reproductive apparatus, whereas the term “gender” is used to refer to the psychosocial implications of being female or male. These implications include gender stereotypes, defined as beliefs about the psychological traits that are characteristic of males vis-à-vis females (Ellemers, 2018); gender (or “sex-role”) identity, defined as beliefs about the extent to which one possesses traits associated with gender stereotypes (Bem, 1974); gender roles, defined as beliefs about the behaviors that are appropriate for males vis-à-vis females (Wood & Eagly, 2010); gender socialization, defined as the processes by which individuals learn gender stereotypes and roles beginning in childhood (Martin & Ruble, 2009); gender schemas, defined as multifaceted, internally consistent sets of ideas that people have about gender (Bem, 1993); and so on. This distinction refers to sex as “something that ‘is,’” whereas it refers to gender as “something that is ‘done,’ ‘accomplished,’ or ‘performed’” (Ahl, 2006, p. 597). The distinction can be important. For example, sex as a biological variable and gender as a socially constructed variable have differential consequences for human health (Cretella et al., 2019).
However, many scholars have relied on the term “gender” to refer to the phenomena being studied, including similarities and differences in the attitudes, behaviors, skills, values, and interests exhibited by females when compared with males (often referred to as gender, not sex, similarities and differences; e.g., Hyde, 2005, 2014) and gender-related phenomena such as those described above (gender stereotypes, identities, roles, socialization, schemas, etc.). These phenomena also include the processes by which institutions such as organizations, economies, and societies become “gendered” or “do gender” (Acker, 1990; Calás & Smircich, 1996; Ridgeway, 1991; Risman, 2004; West & Zimmerman, 1987). For example, gendered organizational processes may include gendered divisions of labor, authority, and the value of work; gendered perpetration of and reactions to sexual harassment; and gendered symbols and images in advertising and publicity materials (Broadbridge & Hearn, 2008). Accordingly, rather than distinguish between sex and gender as in much of my prior research (see Powell, 2019), I use the term gender throughout this book to avoid possible confusion and to be consistent with prevailing terminology in the gender (not sex and gender) literature.
Now that we have settled on terminology, it is important to acknowledge that gender, when considered as a demographic characteristic, does not constitute a binary variable and may be continuous (Hyde et al., 2019; Reilly, 2019); that is, not all people may be classified as being either exclusively female or exclusively male. For example, intersex people possess physical characteristics associated with both females and males, and transgender people identify with a gender different from the one assigned at birth and may undergo a physical