What's the deal with women leaders?

Whilst I'm reading a bit about female leaders, I thought it would be useful to have a reminder of the empirical evidence around this area.

There has genuinely been a lot of good work done and a lot of progress made towards a more equitable work place, and women are now participating in employment and being promoted up to middle management to unprecedented levels. But at senior levels, progress has been slow, hasn't gone far enough, and seems to have stopped. Women make up 22% of parliamentarians, 18% of SME CEOs in the UK, 17% of Fortune 500 corporate board members (mostly in HR and marketing functions) and only 5.2% of CEOs in the US.

So what's going on?

First, there's quite a lot of evidence that women make equally good, just different, leaders from men.

Female leaders do seem to lead in different ways from their male counterparts. Women are more likely to favour a collaborative and participatory approach to leadership which is less hierarchical that that which tends to be adopted by men. But these differences don't appear to be detrimental to the organisations. Women leaders are associated with greater innovation and profitability, broader consumer outreach and better CSR records. It's also been shown that having women at the top makes it more likely that there will be opportunities for women lower down the ranks.

So, women are just as good in senior positions, and yet are not getting the top jobs. The reasons for this are inevitably complex. First there is some good old basic sexism. Women are just not perceived to be capable and competent as leaders. Women need to outperform men to be rated as equal. And this is compounded by something the researchers call 'homosocial reporduction' which is the notion that people tend to want to recruit people who are just like them: if the senior leaders are all men, they will unconsciously favour men when recruiting other senior leaders.

On top of these biases in recruitment, there is also the issue that women don't get the same access to opportunities during the early part of their careers. Men are more likely to be given mentors, and those mentors are more likely to be people who can actually influence on behalf of their mentees. Men are also more likely to get access to strong professional networks, social ties to elites, workplace support and insider information, all of which can make a big difference to chances of promotion.

There is also something called 'role incongruity' which really strikes a chord with me, and which both puts women off going for the top jobs and makes others judge their leadership ability more negatively. Corporate leadership positions are gendered: leaders are conceptualised as masculine (remember Schein's Think Manager Think Male study which demonstrated that people are likely to see the characteristics they associate with good management as masculine character traits). For a man, there is no conflict between the role he is supposed to play in society, and role he is supposed to play in leadership: boosting his masculinity will boost his chances of being perceived as a good leader. 

For a woman, there is a mismatch between the social roles she is expected to fulfil and the role of a leader. A woman has to make a choice between fulfilling her  social role (ie behaving in a feminine way) and fulfilling the role of a leader (ie behaving in a masculine way). She needs to choose between being socially desirable and being successful in the workplace. As well as being a tough choice for any woman who wants to be respected and liked both in society and in work, this phenomenon seems to lead to women being more negatively rated for behaving as leaders: women are given negative ratings for dominating conversations and for engaging in self-promotion where men are given positive ratings for it.

Finally, women leaders are set up to fail. They are more likely to be recruited to precarious management positions (this is the Glass Cliff I've posted about before), they are not given access to the financial resources needed to make the changes they want, and they get less support from their peers.

To sum up: women are not given the opportunities to develop their leadership skills, people recruiting them assume they're not going to be very good, and if they do make it through all of that, they're set up to fail, they are not given the credit they deserve for their achievements and they are not thought to be very likeable.

Grrrr.


Glass, C. and Cook, A. (2016) Leading at the top: understanding women's challenges above the glass ceiling The Leadership Quarterly 27 51 - 63