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. 

Angry Black Men, Aggessive White Women and Ursula Burns

What do 18 female CEO’s of Fortune 500 companies and President Obama have in common? They are examples of social hierarchy reversal – instances of members of low-status social groups ascending to high-status positions.

  

Dr. Robert W. Livingston, social psychologist at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University, investigates the dynamics of social hierarchy reversal at the intersection of race and gender. He combined the results of five of his published papers in one captivating talk.

When do individuals defy social hierarchy? Here are top three findings from Dr. Livingston that fascinated me most.

The Teddy Bear Effect

Black men who attain high-power positions are most likely to display competence, credentials, diligence and…disarming mechanisms. Some of these are behaviors like smiling, displaying erudition and dressing conservatively. Other disarming mechanisms are physical attributes, like a lighter skin tone or babyfaceness. Yes, babyfaceness! Dr. Livingston found that the Black CEO’s were more babyfaced than their white counterparts. He also found that babyfaceness correlated with success in terms of salary and company revenue for Black male CEO’s, but not for their White counterparts.

Essentially, to succeed, Black men had to appear warmer, less threatening and less dominant in addition to being exceedingly competent, credentialed and diligent. This is not limited to the business world – Dr. Livingston investigated and found similar requirements in the political realm, and even in professional sports!

Agency Penalty

When women act tough and take control they are punished for it, while men are not. Alice Eagly and Steven Karau published the first study on this subject in the early 1990’s and since then the body of research has grown, all of it demonstrating a social ‘agency penalty’ for women who act assertive, angry or self-promoting, because doing so violates prescriptive stereotypes that a woman should be warm and docile. It is astounding and outrageous that all of this research only included White women! 

If White women and Black men are both punished for acting dominant and displaying agency… what about Black women? Do they face even tougher penalties or do the race and gender ‘cancel each other out’? Dr. Livingston ran a number of experiments to try and get at this question. One included a bio and picture of a senior executive with a scenario in which the executive dealt with an under-performing employee. The phrases the person used in dealing with the employee either demonstrated agency (i.e. “I demand”) or a communal orientation (i.e. “I encourage you ”). Respondents evaluated the executive as a leader along multiple dimensions. 

Lo and behold, tough White female bosses and tough Black male bosses were not well-received, but both White male and Black female bosses got away with the toughness.

The One Black Female CEO

The audience was skeptical on the last point. Really? Black women are not penalized for showing agency and toughness? Then why is the outspoken Ursula Burns of Xerox, the only Black female CEO of a Fortune 500 company?

Dr. Livingston had asked this question too, though most he could say is that the effects of race combined with gender are complex. His most recent work suggests that there is actually a higher penalty to Black women for failure. He suggested that both getting a ‘free pass’ on agentic behavior and experiencing ‘double jeopardy’ for mistakes is caused by being marginalized but not stigmatized. While stigmatized groups, like Black men or White women are marked, targeted and prominent, marginalized groups are invisible, ignored and irrelevant. Also a bleak picture.

It was clear from all the unanswered questions and the audience reactions that race is not being explored nearly enough in conversations about gender. Truly, it is time to stop saying “gender” and meaning White middle-class women. Today’s conversation was an enlightening beginning of a new WAPPP series focused on the intersection of race and gender, and while I would prefer being neither marginalized nor stigmatized, I look forward to learning more. 

Anya Malkov is an MPP2 at the Harvard Kennedy School, a WAPPP Cultural Bridge Fellow, and an alumna of From Harvard Square to the Oval Office.