Alain Hong

Women in the Lead

All across the globe women are underrepresented in top leadership positions, and there are various explanations for why this is the case. There is evidence that they are promoted at much slower rates and also receive less positive reactions when they behave as leaders. Women may sometimes also be reluctant to aspire a leadership position because they have less leadership confidence or see themselves as less effective leaders.

One of the most important explanations that researchers have advanced for why there are fewer women in leadership positions than men is that there is a mismatch between female gender role expectations and leadership role expectations. According to this social role perspective, women are typically expected to be interpersonally sensitive, friendly, helpful, unselfish, nurturing, and sympathetic, which is not in line with the expectations people have about leaders such as being dominant, assertive, competitive, and independent. This mismatch may not only disfavor them in leadership positions but also in other situations in which dominance and assertiveness are important, such as in competitive negotiations.

This dissertation examined how persistent this mismatch between female gender role expectations and leadership role expectations is, and whether there are ways in which it can be reduced or countered. For this purpose, we examined whether women are more inclined to pursue a leadership role in a context that is more in line with female gender role expectations. In addition, we investigated whether women will be more likely to pursue a leadership role when they receive feedback that goes against stereotypical beliefs about women and leaders. We also examined whether they perform better in negotiations after having been primed with a sense of power. To this end, we developed four experimental studies that included female and male undergraduate students. Moreover, in three experiments we used confederates who acted as undergraduate students, and the leadership studies consisted of mixed-sex groups.

The results of this dissertation showed that women were more willing to be the leader in a more cooperative situation than in a more competitive setting, and that gender differences in this regard disappeared in the former setting. These findings were, however, not replicated with a different experimental procedure in another study. This dissertation also showed that women were more willing to be the leader when they were given positive feedback and that, as a result of this feedback, gender differences in willingness to be the leader disappeared. Moreover, we found that positive feedback, but not counter-stereotypical information, increased women’s willingness to lead because this information made them more confident about their leadership capabilities. In addition, this dissertation showed that women negotiated more beneficial first offers and outcomes for themselves when they had been primed with a sense of power, and that gender differences in first offers and negotiation outcomes disappeared after such a prime.

In line with a social role perspective, the results of this dissertation support the idea that women are less likely to engage in behaviors that are inconsistent with female gender role expectations. The findings of this dissertation suggest that there may still be a mismatch between the behaviors based on female gender role expectations and the more masculine, agentic traits that are seen as essential for leadership. This mismatch may affect women’s leadership behaviors and the choices that they make. The results of this dissertation also indicate that this mismatch can be reduced and that, depending on the (daily) context, the degree of this mismatch may vary. Furthermore, our results imply that personalized feedback influences women’s leadership confidence and emergence more strongly than information that goes against stereotypical beliefs. The findings of this dissertation indicate that it is important to examine women’s own leadership choices, and that both leadership roles and leadership behaviors need to be taken into account when assessing women’s and men’s leadership emergence. In all, this dissertation helped to build a better understanding of why and when women (do not) want to be a leader, and under what circumstances they are more likely to emerge as leaders.