Gender and Leadership. Gary N. Powell
Читать онлайн книгу.
with which they identify (Köllen, 2016). However, because most scholarship on the linkage between gender and leadership has examined the experiences of women vis-à-vis those of men when group comparisons have been made, I will focus on this distinction in the book.
Many theories have been offered and much research has been conducted on various aspects of the linkage between gender and leadership. Early scholars tended to distinguish between person-centered theories, which focus on the suitability of women's traits, skills, and behaviors vis-à-vis those of men for leader roles, and situation-centered theories, which focus on the influence of work environments experienced by women vis-à-vis men in leader roles (Riger & Galligan, 1980). More recently, the emphasis of scholarly attention has shifted to social-system-centered theories, which focus on gendered societal processes that influence the enactment of leadership (Calás et al., 2014). Blurring the distinction between these types of theories, social-system-centered theories may be offered for person-centered and situation-centered phenomena, and situation-centered theories may be offered for person-centered phenomena. Examples of person-centered, situation-centered, and social-system-centered theories and both confirming and disconfirming evidence will be provided throughout the book.
Intersectionality refers to the notion that multiple identities intersect or overlap to shape individuals’ experiences in complex ways (Acker, 2006; Ridgeway & Kricheli-Katz, 2013; Rodriguez et al., 2016; Rosette et al., 2018). Although the book is intended to focus primarily on the linkage between gender and leadership, the intersection of gender and other personal characteristics such as race and ethnicity, sexual orientation, national origin, religion, socioeconomic class, age, and so on may also be linked to leadership. However, issues of intersectionality are frequently ignored in research.
For example, most studies of the linkage between gender and leadership have not examined the influence of the racial or ethnic group of the individuals who were the focus of the study. By ignoring issues of race and ethnicity, such studies reflect an underlying assumption that gender similarities and differences in leadership-related phenomena are essentially the same for members of different racial and ethnic groups (Smooth, 2010). When the intersection of gender and other personal characteristics such as sexual orientation (Bowleg, 2008) and national origin and religion (Arifeen & Gatrell, 2020) is factored in, the list of assumptions previously made about gender similarities and differences in leadership-related phenomena across members of different groups grows. We need to guard against making such assumptions ourselves.
Finally, it is important to address what makes gender differences in leadership-related phenomena meaningful. A massive literature has accumulated over time on similarities and differences between women and men in almost everything measurable, and reviews of this literature go back more than a century (e.g., Kumra et al., 2014; Maccoby & Jacklin, 1974; Woolley, 1910). Over time, the nature of literature reviews on gender similarities and differences has shifted from narrative reviews to meta-analyses, which synthesize statistical evidence from different research studies on the same topic (Hyde & Grabe, 2008). As this shift has occurred, a heated debate has arisen over what constitutes a large, moderate, or small gender difference in meta-analytic results and what the implications of the magnitude of the difference are (e.g., Eagly, 1995, 2018; Hyde, 2005, 2014). On the one hand, Hyde (2005, p. 589) argued that most gender differences are in what may be considered a close-to-zero or small range, thereby supporting a “gender similarities” hypothesis over inflated claims of widespread gender differences. On the other hand, Eagly (1995) argued that a feminist political agenda devoted to disproving gender stereotypes has contributed to scholars’ inaccurately minimizing gender differences and exaggerating gender similarities.
In response to this debate as it emerged, Martell et al. (1996) conducted a computer simulation that yielded intriguing results. They specified a hypothetical organization with eight hierarchical levels occupied by 500 employees at the bottom level, ten employees at the top level, and an equal number of women and men initially at each level. In this organization, consistent with meta-analytic findings that women's work is evaluated less favorably than men's work (Eagly et al., 1992), a performance evaluation system added “bias points” to the performance score of each male employee such that 1% of the variance in performance scores was attributable to gender. The simulation began with removing 15% of the jobholders at each level; open positions were then filled from within the organization by promoting candidates from the level below with the highest performance scores. Averaging across multiple simulation runs, even though half of the top-level positions were specified as filled by women at the onset, only 35% of top management positions were filled by women in the end. In other words, a slightly unequal playing field favoring men at the beginning of the simulation led to men holding almost two-thirds of top management positions by its end.
The simulation demonstrated that, as Martell and colleagues (1996, p. 158) put it, “a little bias hurt women a lot.” The researchers concluded, “The effects of male-female differences are best determined not by the magnitude of the effect but its consequences in natural settings.” Their study demonstrated the considerable practical importance of what may seem to be small gender differences, in this case a 1% difference favoring men in performance evaluation scores that influenced leader promotions. Even extremely small gender differences in a leadership-related phenomenon may have a cumulatively large effect over time, which in my opinion renders such differences definitely meaningful.
Researching Gender and Leadership: A Personal Journey
I began my doctoral studies in management and organizational behavior at the University of Massachusetts during the 1970s. A women's liberation movement that arose during the decade in nations such as the United Kingdom (Binard, 2017), the United States (Yelton-Stanley & Howard, 2000), and Australia (Magarey, 2018) had a major impact on women's attitudes, and indirectly men's attitudes, about their proper vis-à-vis preferred roles as well as on organizational and societal practices. To cite a few examples, pressure from this movement led to a greater awareness of and reduced emphasis on gender stereotypes in children's books, the elimination of separate advertising for “women's jobs” and “men's jobs” in newspapers, the passage of laws in many nations that banned discrimination on the basis of gender and other personal characteristics, and the appearance of women's studies (later called “gender studies”) courses in many universities. Also during the 1970s, the proportion of women in managerial and professional occupations significantly increased (Powell, 1988). In short, it was a decade of considerable turmoil and change around gender issues.
I was influenced by these developments and sought to explore them in my research and teaching. My first research study on gender and leadership (Powell & Butterfield, 1979), to be described in Chapter 2, was conducted with Tony Butterfield, my former dissertation supervisor who became my life-long collaborator, colleague, mentor, and friend. At about the same time, early in my career at the University of Connecticut, I was given the opportunity to teach a graduate elective on any topic I wanted. I decided to teach a course with a unique title, “Women and Men in Management.” The title was chosen to legitimize the course's having a male instructor (me), increase its appeal to male as well as female students, and call attention to the fact that people typically said “men and women” in that order rather than the order in the course title. To make a long story short, the course's first offering drew enough students for it to be offered on a regular basis; further, the course won the AACSB Committee on Equal Opportunity for Women Innovation Award, which inspired me to write a scholarly book with the same title “based on the award-winning course” (Sage, the publisher, was impressed).
What came to be the first edition of Women and Men in Management (Powell, 1988) chronicled the major transformations in the nature of female and male roles that had occurred in the workplace in recent years and looked ahead to what changes might be yet to come. It presented two diametrically opposed scenarios for the roles that women vis-à-vis men would play in the workplace of the future. In the positive scenario, all employees are treated according to the human capital they bring to the job – knowledge, skills, abilities, education, relevant work experience, past performance, and so on (Stumpf & London, 1981) – and given the chance to reach their leadership potential regardless of their gender. In the negative scenario, gender stereotypes and roles are the primary