Gender and Leadership

Gary N. Powell, Author

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9781529709117
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781529737158
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Management
• Index: Business

An exciting new book exploring why we have not seen the enduring changes that were once optimistically anticipated. Each chapter tackles an important question around gender and leadership, such as ?Why do leader stereotypes emphasize masculinity??, ?Why are there so few women in top management positions?? and ?Why do (some) men in top management feel free to sexually harass women??. 

Leading international scholar in the field, Gary N. Powell explores cutting-edge topics including;

• the appropriate role of masculinity in leadership, 
• the ever-so-small numbers of female CEOs, 
• and sexual harassment by men in power such as Harvey Weinstein and the resulting #MeToo movement.

With suggestions of practical steps that would work toward achieving a workplace in which all employees can reach their leadership potential regardless of their gender, Gender and Leadership is an important read for students and faculty members alike across the social sciences and humanities.

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 transition so that they become members of the gender 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 basis for treating others, predicting their behavior, and evaluating how they behave regardless of their human capital. The book concluded by basically saying “it's up to all of us” as to which scenario would be more likely to prevail in the future (Powell, 1988). However, given all the workplace changes that had occurred in the 1970s and 1980s, the overall message of the book was hopeful.

Since then, subsequent editions of Women and Men in Management (Powell, 1993, 2011, 2019; Powell & Graves, 2003) as well as subsequent articles in what came to be my research program on issues regarding gender and leadership have offered regular assessments of the state of affairs regarding these issues. However, as I have researched and written about this topic for over four decades, my perspective on these issues has gradually evolved from being more optimistic (e.g., “Sex discrimination in leadership positions favoring men has traditionally existed. However, there has recently been considerable growth in the proportion of women in management, a positive sign.”) to being more pessimistic (e.g., “Sex discrimination in leadership positions favoring men persists, although its nature has evolved. Further, growth in the proportion of women in management, including in top management positions, has stalled.”) If the social goal of research on the linkage between gender and leadership is to eliminate the need for such research (i.e., to foster achievement of the positive scenario described above), I do not anticipate that this goal will be attained anytime in the foreseeable future.

Hence, this book. I believe that we still need to talk about the linkage between gender and leadership. Something troubling and problematic is still going on regarding this linkage that calls for our unwavering attention as scholars.

Organization of the Book

The next four chapters of the book explore research questions regarding specific aspects of the linkage between gender and leadership. Chapter 2 addresses the frequently researched question, “Why do leader stereotypes emphasize masculinity?” Chapter 3 addresses a complementary question, “Why are there so few women in top management positions?” Chapter 4 addresses a question that has emerged in recent years, “Is there a female advantage or disadvantage in the managerial ranks?” Chapter 5 addresses a question ripped from today's headlines:...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• SAGE Swifts
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Acknowledgements
• Contents
• About the Author
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Why Are We Talking about the Linkage between Gender and Leadership?
• 2 Why Do Leader Stereotypes Emphasize Masculinity?
• 3 Why Are There So Few Women in Top Management Positions?
• 4 Is There a Female Advantage or Disadvantage in the Managerial Ranks?
• 5 Why Do (Some) Men in Top Management Feel Free to Sexually Harass Women?
• 6 What Actions Would Work Toward Undoing the Linkage between Gender and Leadership?
• References
• Index