Gender and Leadership. Gary N. Powell
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whether accurately or not, as deficient in the traits needed for a specific leader position will be unlikely to attain the position.
If both gender and leader stereotypes have these kinds of effects, the linkage between the two types of stereotypes is likely to have significant effects as well. Hence, this chapter.
The Linkage between Gender and Leader Stereotypes
Research
At the time I began my scholarly career, there had been little published research on the linkage between gender and leadership, and leadership theories had been based almost entirely on studies of male managers. A classic 1974 compendium of research results, Handbook of Leadership (Stogdill, 1974), discovered few studies that examined female leaders exclusively or even included female leaders in their samples. When female managers were present in organizations being studied, they were usually excluded from the analysis because their inclusion might lead to distorted results!
However, Bem (1974) had recently argued that more effective people are high in both masculine (agentic) and feminine (communal) traits, or “androgynous.” Consistent with the feminist spirit of the time, the concept of androgyny received “instant celebrity” (Bem, 1993, p. 121) in the psychology of women literature. Androgyny was soon found to be associated with high self-esteem, a flexible response to situations rather than a rigid emphasis on feminine or masculine behaviors, and a host of other positive outcomes (Lenney, 1979). In short, androgyny was proposed as an ideal combination of “the best of both worlds.” I found the concept appealing, as it was consistent with my own values (“let's get rid of expectations that people conform to gender stereotypes and roles if we can”) and had apparent benefits.
When I first read Bem (1974), a light bulb went on in my head. I asked Tony Butterfield, “If the androgyny concept has not yet been applied in work settings, why not apply it ourselves?” As we later put it (Powell & Butterfield, 1979, p. 396), “If the more effective person is androgynous, the more effective manager may be androgynous as well.” The proportion of women in management positions had been increasing, which may have contributed to the replacement of masculine standards for managerial behavior with androgynous standards. Accordingly, we optimistically hypothesized a linkage between gender and leader stereotypes such that the “good manager” would be perceived as androgynous (Powell & Butterfield, 1979). To test the hypothesis, we surveyed samples of undergraduate business students and part-time (i.e., evening) MBA students in the mid-1970s; respondents were asked to describe both themselves and a good manager on the Bem Sex-Role Inventory (BSRI; Bem, 1974), an instrument with separate scales assessing the independent dimensions of masculinity and femininity. Our hypothesis was soundly rejected. Instead, the good manager was perceived as possessing predominantly masculine traits by women and men in both populations.
Meanwhile, the proportion of women in management positions was continuing to rise (Powell, 1988). Also, in response to criticism of some of the items in the original BSRI, Bem had released a “new and improved” version of the BSRI, called the Short BSRI (Bem, 1981), that contained half of the original items and was found to be a more valid and reliable instrument (Choi et al., 2009). Therefore, we decided to survey the same two populations in the mid-1980s, now using the Short BSRI, while posing the same optimistic hypothesis: The good manager would be perceived as androgynous (Powell & Butterfield, 1989). In short, we were arguing that “we want a recount” of the earlier results with new data. Once again, the hypothesis was soundly rejected, both for the new data and for the earlier data re-analyzed using only the items included in the Short BSRI. The good manager was still perceived in predominantly masculine terms.
A decade later, Tony and I, this time with Jane Parent (Powell et al., 2002), revisited the linkage between gender and leader stereotypes with new data collected from the same two populations in the late 1990s. For this study, we got the message conveyed by our earlier results and reluctantly gave up on arguing for the applicability of the androgyny concept to descriptions of a good manager. Instead, because the proportion of women managers was still rising (Powell & Graves, 2003), we examined whether change in leader stereotypes in relation to gender stereotypes, perhaps due to this change in the composition of the managerial ranks, had occurred over time. Accordingly, we hypothesized that the good manager would be perceived in newly-collected data as less masculine than in data collected earlier. We found some support for this hypothesis for both undergraduate and part-time MBA students. However, the good manager was still described in predominantly masculine terms as before.
In our next study in this stream of research, incorporating data collected from identical populations in the late 2000s with data collected during the three previous decades, Tony and I decided to examine stability and change in the correspondence between self-descriptions and good-manager descriptions over four decades (Powell & Butterfield, 2015a). We found that, when good-manager descriptions and self-descriptions were compared, men consistently saw themselves as more like the good manager than women did in data collected in each decade and for all four decades combined. There was no consistent pattern of change for either women or men in correspondence between self- and good-manager descriptions across the four decades. Also, as before, the good manager was seen as possessing predominantly masculine traits.
We have extended this stream of research over time to the political arena. Periodically, during US presidential election campaigns, we have collected similar data using the Short BSRI (Bem, 1981) on descriptions of the “ideal president” as well as the candidates of the two major political parties (e.g., Powell & Butterfield, 2011; Powell et al., 2018). In such studies, we have always found that the ideal president is described in predominantly masculine terms. Also, the candidate whose leader profile is perceived as closest to that of the ideal president typically, but not always, wins the election; Donald Trump's victory over Hillary Clinton in 2016 was the exception (Powell et al., 2018).
Considerable research by others has followed Powell and Butterfield's (1979) original research design in examining the linkage between gender and leader stereotypes. For example, additional supporting evidence has been found within specific occupations such as the military (“think military leader – think masculine;” Boyce & Herd, 2003) and athletics (“think athletic director – think masculine;” Burton et al., 2009). As summarized in Koenig et al. (2011), these research results offer strong support for what I call the think manager – think masculine paradigm of the linkage between gender and leader stereotypes (they called it the “agency – communion paradigm”).
Schein (1973, 1975) initiated a related stream of research in the 1970s. She compiled a list of characteristics that people commonly believed distinguished between women and men, i.e., served as the basis for gender stereotypes. She then asked a sample of US middle managers to describe how well each of the characteristics fit women in general, men in general, or successful middle managers in general. Schein hypothesized that because the vast majority of managers were men, the managerial job would be regarded as requiring personal attributes thought to be more characteristic of men than women. In support of her hypothesis, she found that both male and female middle managers believed that a successful middle manager possessed personal characteristics that more closely matched beliefs about the characteristics of men in general than those of women in general. In subsequent studies conducted worldwide, both men and women believe that men are more similar to successful managers than women are, but men endorse such beliefs to a greater extent than women do (Schein et al., 1996). As summarized in Koenig et al. (2011), these results support the think manager – think male paradigm of the linkage between gender and leader stereotypes, especially among men.
Thus the linkage between gender and leader stereotypes continues to reflect the closely related notions of think manager – think masculine and think manager – think male. If men are perceived as essentially masculine as a group as gender stereotypes suggest (Ellemers, 2018; Kite et al., 2008), the two paradigms similarly demonstrate the overall masculinity of leader stereotypes (Koenig et al., 2011). At the same time, my initial optimism (and hopefulness) that leader stereotypes would emphasize androgyny rather than masculinity as more women entered the managerial ranks has evolved over time towards pessimism. If androgyny theories originating with Bem (1974) have not helped to explain the linkage between