New Ways of Thinking About Gender and Leadership Effectiveness with Aparna Joshi

The challenges that women face in entering and performing effectively in leadership roles have been widely documented: recent research indicates that the gender gap in pay and promotion is fourteen times greater than gaps in performance. The disconnect between rewards and performance is particularly large in high-prestige occupations. Aparna Joshi, Arnold Family Professor of Management at Penn State University, presented two studies on gender and leadership effectiveness, examining the issue from the perspective of both men and women in leadership roles.

Professor Joshi’s research focuses on gender as a social construction, rather than biological sex differences.  Much of the work that has been done about sex effects in senior management roles focuses on women, but men have gender too! Focusing on sex also may obscure variability among women and men. Through this lens, Professor Joshi investigates whether women are rewarded when they are able to navigate through masculinized environments and whether men are punished when they cannot.

Gender and Leadership in the U.S. Congress

Politics in the United States is a highly masculine context; while women have been making gains in representation, women legislators make up approximately 20% of the U.S. Congress. Professor Joshi’s first study focused on when female politicians have been successful in bringing about change: to what extent are women legislators able to get bills passed? What types of bills are they more or less successful at getting passed? Are women legislators more successful when they highlight their distinctiveness, or when they try to assimilate with the dominant group?

To test these questions, Professor Joshi utilized a sixteen-year longitudinal data set of all Congressional bills introduced from 1993 to 2008, controlling for the president in office and the majority party in Congress. In general, men were more effective than women in getting bills passed (850 to 133) and introduced a larger number of bills overall (approximately 12,000 of 70,000 were introduced by women). Professor Joshi and her colleagues examined the content of these bills and coded them on a range from more female-identified (education, healthcare) to more male-identified (defense, fiscal policy).

The results of this analysis reveal that women legislators are as good as men at getting neutral (neither male- nor female-identified) bills passed.  Men legislators were also about as effective as women at getting female-identified bills; though many men don’t think that they have the credibility to speak about “women’s issues,” they nevertheless demonstrated legislative success. The most significant finding from this sample was that women legislators were particularly successful in getting male-identified bills passed.  This finding indicates that for women in male-dominated environments, distancing themselves from their distinctive identity group may correlate with greater success.

There was also an interesting effect over the tenure of female legislators that seems to indicate both a novelty premium for new legislators and a credibility premium for more senior legislators in passing female-identified bills. This finding presents an exciting avenue for future research!

Gender and Leadership among Fortune 500 CEOs

Professor Joshi also presented a study to problematize the “think manager think male” paradigm that tends to treat men as a monolithic bloc rather than examining variability among men. This study focused on masculinity as a source of variability for men: do different levels of masculinity and femininity predict differential performance or pay among men?

To test this question, Professor Joshi and her colleagues coded interview videos of male Fortune 500 CEOs for masculine and feminine traits and compared these findings to their pay in the first year of being CEO.  Even within this highly select sample of male CEOs, there was a range of femininity and masculinity that further reinforces the idea that men are not all the same.

Among this sample, femininity did not have significant effects on pay or performance.  Controlling for the firm’s prior performance, CEOs that were androgynous were the highest performing in the sample. However, CEOs that were masculine or androgynous were the highest paid in the sample. These findings indicate that while greater masculinity doesn’t correlate with higher performance, it does relate to higher pay.

This study demonstrates, first, that there is gender variability among men, even at the CEO level. Secondly, variations in masculinity can have costs for men. Rather than affecting only women, the “think manager/think male” paradigm also has implications for men navigating masculinized working environments. Further research on gender and leadership effectiveness should be sure to take into account gendered effects on both men and women.