Should She Lead? Why Colleagues of Women, and Women Themselves, Often Think the Answer is No with Alison Wood Brooks

Should women lead? We here at WAPPP strongly believe yes, but many people, including women themselves, often think the answer is no. This year’s first WAPPP seminar featured Alison Wood Brooks, Assistant Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School. Professor Brooks presented results from two published papers regarding perceptions of women in leadership roles and women’s experiences of those roles, as well as two earlier-stage projects.

We know women are underrepresented in leadership positions: less than 15% of executive officers are women, less than 11% of US firms with venture capital backing have been founded or led by women, and less than 5% of Fortune 500 CEOs are women. To understand why, Professor Brooks examines both demand-side factors (how people perceive and react to women in the workplace) and supply-side factors (how women themselves think and behave in the workplace, including individual differences in personality and preferences).

The Demand Side: How Gender and Attractiveness Affect Entrepreneurial Pitch Success

On the demand side, Professor Brooks presented a study demonstrating that investors prefer entrepreneurial ventures pitched by attractive men. An analysis of the pitches given at the three largest entrepreneurial pitch competitions across the US over three years revealed that male entrepreneurs were 60% more likely than female entrepreneurs to win the competition and earn investor funding. In their study, Professor Brooks and her colleagues asked 521 people to watch two entrepreneurial pitch videos and choose one to invest in, switching whether the video was narrated by a male or a female voice. Sixty-eight percent of participants chose a venture pitched by a male voice, at a very high level of statistical significance, controlling for the pitch itself, the order the pitches were presented, participant gender, and participant age.

However, field data reveals that this effect is not just about gender: attractive male entrepreneurs were statistically significantly more likely to win pitch competitions than less-attractive male entrepreneurs. Interestingly, in the field data, there was no statistically significant impact of attractiveness on female entrepreneurial success. In the next stage of the study, to understand whether attractive people might just be better at pitching, the researchers asked 194 people to watch one pitch video and rate it. The researchers varied whether participants heard a male or female voice, and whether the photo of the narrator they were shown was more or less attractive. Participants were asked how likely they were to invest in the venture and to what extent the pitch was persuasive, fact-based, and logical. Again, attractive male entrepreneurs were significantly more likely to secure investment than less-attractive men, while there was no statistically significant difference for women. However, male-narrated pitches were rated as more persuasive, fact-based, and logical. These findings indicate that male entrepreneurs – especially attractive ones—are more likely to receive investor funding than are female entrepreneurs based on their gender and physical attractiveness rather than the content of their ideas.

Extending the Analysis: Data from Kickstarter

Professor Brooks embarked on a new project to replicate and extend this study using big data from Kickstarter.com, a large crowdfunding platform. Professor Brooks and her colleagues took a sample of 1,249 projects from Kickstarter that included a picture of a single entrepreneur whose gender could easily be identified. Ten independent judges rated the age and attractiveness of the entrepreneurs in every photo. The researchers used the number of investors as a measure of pitch success and included other available information (including number of days left in the campaign) as control variables. Analysis of the Kickstarter data replicates Professor Brooks’ earlier findings. Male entrepreneurs had about twice as many investors compared to female investors, and for male investors (but not female investors) attractiveness garnered more investors.

Professor Brooks also included two follow-up experiments. The first was designed to test the relationship between entrepreneur gender, entrepreneur attractiveness, and investor gender. The results reveal that male investors are more likely to fund good-looking male and female entrepreneurs, but that female investors are more likely to fund attractive male entrepreneurs and less likely to fund attractive female entrepreneurs. The second experiment was to test to what extend these results are about threat. Are women threatened by attractive women? Are men threatened by successful men? The data bears out this initial hypothesis: women are less likely than men to invest in ventures run by attractive women, but are more likely than men to invest in ventures run by successful men.

The Supply Side: How Do Women Themselves View Professional Advancement?

On the supply side, Professor Brooks presented a study indicating that compared to men, women view professional advancement as equally attainable, but less desirable. When asked to list their core goals in life, female participants listed more goals than men overall, but a smaller proportion of women’s goals were related to achieving power at work. These findings hold when people make their own lists of goals, when they select goals from a pre-determined list, and when they reject goals from a pre-determined list. When asked to what extent they expect certain positive or negative outcomes resulting from a promotion to a higher-power position at work, men and women report equivalent levels of positive reactions to the promotion, but women report stronger negative reactions to the promotion. Men and women rate the promotion as equally attainable, but women rate the promotion as less desirable and, compared to men, are less likely to accept the position. These results are consistent across high-level executives, mid-level managers, recent MBA alumni, and undergraduate students.

Importantly, these findings are descriptive, not prescriptive. It may be that men and women are correctly predicting the unique experiences they will each face in high-power positions; alternatively, women may be overestimating the negative consequences associated with power, men may be underestimating the negative consequences associated with power, or both.

New Areas for Research: Gender, Power, Laughter, and Happiness

In a new project, Professor Brooks is working to investigate the relationships between gender, power, laughter, and happiness. Two sources of data provide converging evidence that men and women might use laughter differently: the U.S. Gallup Poll 2013 and speed-dating conversations. In the Gallup poll, women report laughing and smiling more than men in their daily lives, but also report experiencing more negative emotions (worry, sadness, anger, stress). In the speed dating context, women are more likely to laugh during their dates, regardless of how funny they find their partner. However, female laughter is a worse indicator of interest in a second date compared to male laughter. Said differently, women laugh more often, irrespective of humor, but not in a way that is necessarily connected to interest. As there has been little research done on the supply-side dimension of women’s unique experiences, particularly in leadership roles, this is an area ripe for exploration.

For more on Professor Brooks’ research, check out our Gender Action Portal:

http://gap.hks.harvard.edu/investors-prefer-entrepreneurial-ventures-pitched-attractive-men

http://gap.hks.harvard.edu/compared-men-women-view-professional-advancement-equally-attainable-less-desirable

Gendered Career Negotiations: A Toolkit for Navigating, Bending, and Shaping Institutions

This week’s WAPPP seminar was the last of the year! It’s been an honor being your blogger this semester, and I’m looking forward to more cutting-edge gender research in these seminars next year. This week, WAPPP’s own Bobbi Thomason, Senior Fellow and Lecturer at Wharton, presented her work in collaboration with Hannah Riley Bowles and Julia Bear.

Current Literature Doesn’t Reflect Many Women’s Negotiation Experiences

We’ve spoken a lot this year about women’s career negotiations, focusing in particular on the effects of ambiguity and stereotypes on negotiation and the social cost of negotiating flexible work arrangements. However, much of the research on gender and negotiations doesn’t reflect the diversity of contexts in which women negotiate. Professor Thomason’s research group analyzed 43 studies on gender and career negotiation, and realized that the overwhelming number (70%) were lab studies, all of them talked about compensation while only some discussed job benefits or promotion, and 95% were negotiations with just one counterpart.

Because the literature is overwhelmingly on institutional topics and standard terms, like one’s starting salary, it’s unclear whether it generalizes to broader career topics that matter for women’s leadership positions and lifetime earnings. One other concern is that negotiating about money may be a gendered trigger. The “ideal worker” for most organizations is a male breadwinner with no outside commitments or distractions, who is understood to have a full-time caregiver at home. When women negotiate for a higher salary or bonus, it may go against stereotypes of how a female worker “should” act and elicit negative reactions.

Using Fieldwork to Build Lab-Testable Theories

Ideally, Professor Thomason explained, research is a combination of grounded theory building in the field – conducting interviews and observing people in the real world – which helps researchers construct hypotheses to test in the lab. Because the current understanding of gender and negotiations is so dominated by lab work on compensation, there is a significant opportunity to do qualitative fieldwork to better understand women’s lived experiences with negotiation.

In that vein, Professor Thomason presented three interrelated studies on the lived experiences of gender in career negotiations: a survey of 46 women, interviews with 49 male and female senior government officials, and a survey of workers in a large professional services firm.

Study 1: Understanding the Types of Negotiation

Professor Thomason’s research group surveyed women in corporate and entrepreneurial roles about their negotiation experiences and found three main types of negotiations. Institutional negotiations are standard requests, like asking for a raise. Institution bending negotiations are about creating a nonstandard work arrangement for an individual employee, like negotiating a flexible schedule. Institution shaping negotiations change the organization itself, often by creating a new role, program, or practice.

Study 2: Who Participates in Each Type of Negotiation, and What Do They Discuss?

In the second study, the research group examined a more institutionally constrained context, the US federal government. This study allowed the researchers to survey men and women and to test whether certain types of negotiations are easier in startups or other work settings that value flexibility and disruption. Each of the 49 interviewees shared stories of negotiating for their own and for others’ career advancement.

The researchers found that men in this sample did far more institutional negotiations and institution shaping negotiations. By contrast, women did significantly more institution bending negotiations for themselves than men did. (So much for the notion that women don't negotiate!) When negotiating for others, that gap disappears: men and women do about the same amount of institution bending and shaping negotiations for others, and men do more institutional negotiations for others than women.

Examining the topic of negotiations showed that compensation was a very small proportion of the issues discussed, in contrast to its disproportionate representation in most studies. Role negotiations were the most common topic – all of the institution shaping negotiations were about role, but role considerations were discussed in each of the three types. Notably, only women participated in institution bending negotiations for geographic and temporal flexibility.

Study 3: Understanding Gender and Leadership in Negotiation

The researchers interviewed 156 partners and senior partners in a professional services firm for the third study. Participants were asked about the frequency of certain types of career negotiation over their career at the firm and were prompted to recall and report on a recent career negotiation. At the end of the survey, participants were asked a series of questions to measure their “perceived freedom to negotiate.” The overall mean for the sample was a 4.7 on a 7 point scale – an “agree somewhat” that they feel free to negotiate career-related issues. There was no difference in perceived freedom to negotiate based on gender or leadership role, which is quite noteworthy!

Professor Thomason’s research group asked whether certain negotiation types are correlated with gender or leadership roles. Women (both partners and senior partners) report significantly more institution bending negotiations than men. However, there are no significant gender differences in institutional or institution shaping negotiations. Senior partners (those in leadership roles) report significantly more institution shaping negotiations, but leadership role is not significantly correlated with institutional or institution bending negotiations. In terms of topic, men report a much higher frequency of job-offer negotiations, like those regarding compensation, whereas women report a much higher frequency of workload and work-life flexibility negotiations.

In their interviews, there was no gender difference in ability to recall a recent negotiation, which refutes the assumption that “women don’t negotiate.” There was also no difference between partners and senior partners in recalling a recent negotiation, which indicates that everyone negotiates. The median length of reported negotiations was an extraordinary 90 days, which may present some obstacles to replicating real-life negotiations in a lab setting. Reported negotiations tend to be with more senior and “somewhat close” colleagues, and unlike most lab studies, most negotiations involve multiple counterparts. On average, 90% of men’s negotiation counterparts were also men, while only 13% of women’s negotiation counterparts were also women. There was no gender difference in satisfaction with the outcome, and 88% of the reported negotiations were resolved.

Opportunities for Future Research

This research provides important information about who negotiates, what negotiation type they employ, and the topic of negotiation that can be used to inform new theories and new lab experiments. However, Professor Thomason pointed out, these self-reports could be influenced by gender-appropriate narratives, which may obscure some of the reality of negotiations. It’s also unclear whether leaders conduct more institutional shaping negotiations because they are already in leadership roles or whether they use these negotiations to attain leadership roles. Future research is needed to test these propositions.

One of the key contributions of this work is examining women who have made it and women who have made it big. If the negotiation literature only focuses on barriers to women’s negotiation or the women who have failed to advance, it may inadvertently perpetuate the stereotype that women don’t negotiate or don’t negotiate well. Further research will help us develop a broader conceptualization of gender and career negotiations beyond “women don’t ask” to better understand how women wield negotiation to advance in their careers.

The Silent Sex: Gender, Deliberation, and Institutions

Imagine for a moment that you are the head of a neighborhood council, a mayor organizing your city council meetings, or the president of a local worker's union. Though the mix of women and men in your group has started to even out over the years, you're finding that the official minutes of your meetings indicate otherwise. Men still make most of the comments on record, and file most of the motions. You're concerned that women's perspectives - and those of the women they represent - aren't being captured. What do you do?

Tali Mendelberg, Professor of Politics at Princeton University, discussed her research at yesterday's WAPPP Seminar that explores how gender gaps in representation affect women and men's voice and influence in small decision making bodies. Professor Mendelberg's research began with the hypothesis that there is a relationship between a group's decision rules, its gender balance, and the representation of women's voices.

By studying five-person School Boards, she found that the gender composition affects both the amount of time women speak, and the types of issues discussed. When there are at least three of five women in the body, it increases discussion of women's issues, or "care" issues, but only if the group makes decisions based on majority rule. If the group follows unanimous rule, where all five people must agree to pass the resolution, then women's issues are discussed more only when men outnumber women.

As for talk time, or discussion participation, women spoke significantly less than men UNTIL there were four women included in a five-member body. That's an 80% tipping point!

How was this measured? Professor Mendelberg and her team looked at the time men and women spent speaking in the group, and found that gender parity was only reached when women were the majority and the group followed majority rule. The group with unanimous rule found its gender parity declining as the number of women in the group increased. These findings carried over to the frequency at which "care" topics were discussed and the number of times women first mentioned these topics.

Professor Mendelberg's research into gender parity in group composition, both in body and voice, and how that impacts the group's decision making processes is a fascinating starting point. Meetings are the backbone of democracy. As more deliberative bodies -- boardrooms, neighborhood councils, even congressional commissions -- find themselves with an increasing number of women (or not!), they would be well served to consider the rules they follow to guide conversation and decision-making.

Further research could help indicate whether these findings carry over to dynamics of other minority groups: how does race, ethnicity, nationality, class, sexuality, or disability factor into deliberative processes? Our identities are multi-faceted, as are our proclivities to express ourselves and hold firm with our convictions and desired outcomes in diverse groups.  If you were that leader described in the opening of this post, what would you do? How would you incorporate the voices of minorities in your group, and assure that group decisions reflect their concerns? The research presented yesterday indicates that not only should you look at the composition of your group, but you should look to the rules that you follow, as well.  The rules that permit the highest integration of diverse views may shift, depending on the makeup of the group.



Valerie Kane is an MPP candidate at the Harvard Kennedy School

Diversity to a Deadline: Delivering Everyone's London

The research is growing: for those of us concerned about diversity and the incorporation of traditionally excluded groups' members and voices into realms ranging from politics and boardrooms, to cubicles and community functions, there is probably a report or an experiment to which we can turn. We can examine the resilience of diverse groups, the challenges they face, and the styles of leadership that guide them best. 

Reports and experiments are valuable, but when an entity embraces a goal to integrate diversity and inclusion throughout all functional areas, what does this actually look like?

Stephen Frost, WAPPP Fellow and former Head of Diversity & Inclusion for the London Organizing Committee of the Olympic Games and Paralympic Games, was faced with this challenge. He spoke yesterday not as an academic, but as a practitioner. Before we begin, watch this fun video for a quick recap of the history of the modern Olympic Games and how this factors into the need for an intentional focus on diversity and inclusion.

Frost approached the task before him with an important guiding principle: it doesn't just happen. Diversity and inclusion (D&I) could not be taken for granted as a given in international games, nor could it be seen as a extra little side program.  Rather, D&I needed to be a commitment integrated into all functions and decisions. The question "had to become not why would you do the program, but why wouldn't you?"

The D&I process for the London Olympic Games had three components: understand, lead, and deliver.  London's vision was to use the power of the games to inspire change. The bid to the Olympic Committee highlighted diversity - of age, ethnicity, ability, gender identity, sexual orientation, and social status. A wonderful goal, to bring the experience of the Olympics more in line with the myriad of lives gathered in the audience, serving as volunteers, or employed as staff, but how?

Leadership is the key. Frost brought in Desmond Tutu to inspire the board and agency managers. Nearly all at the upper and mid-management level signed the diversity leadership pledge. There were no quotas for hiring; instead, information was monitored and frequently shared. No department wanted to rank at the bottom of this shared list, creating an internally competitive dynamic to meet and exceed all targets. The media caught word of this process, and unfortunately mocked it with headlines like, "Will Britain Take Gold for the Most PC Olympics Ever?"

The proof, however, was in the pudding. This process was not about being politically correct.  It was about showing that a commitment to diversity and inclusion could be realized to exceed expectations in a large organization - and that these were, indeed, the people's games.  The final part of the D&I process, delivery, illustrated its success. Frost highlighted the D&I efforts in workforce, procurement (supply chain/contractors), and service delivery.  Specialized programs reached out to traditionally excluded groups for the workforce, no contract over £20,000 could be awarded unless the contractor met certain D&I standards and was approved by the Diversity Team, and the various needs of different groups were taken into account while designing details such as counter heights and entrances. 

Frost challenges practitioners to reframe their perspectives on diversity and inclusion.  While a commitment is necessary, there need not be additional programs or requirements - creating a more inclusive workplace need not be a burden.  The key is removing barriers to entry, and accepting diversity and inclusion as critical aspects of every day business.



Valerie Kane is an MPP Candidate at the Harvard Kennedy School.

Do Female Leaders Mitigate Negative Effects of Diversity? The Case of National Leaders

Many of us are familiar with this scene: the boardroom is transformed from a place of suits and reports to one with mellon balls, cheese plates, colorful paper napkins, and mingling coworkers. Yes, this is your average company party. No, the intention is not to keep you in the office longer or find out who has the strangest sense of humor. Rather, these parties are part of a technique utilized by many organizations to overcome what Columbia Business School professor Katherine Phillips calls "the negative effects of Diversity 1.0."

Professor Phillips spoke yesterday about reframing our understanding of the challenges diverse groups face, and the leadership styles that could offer more opportunities for group cohesion and success. Diversity 1.0 represents the interpersonal dynamics that sometimes challenge these groups - often experienced as increased emotional conflict, explained in part by similarity attraction. Diversity 2.0 is the effort to understand what is causing the challenges in 1.0 - what are the underlying structural issues, and how can these be ameliorated?

Let's use some buzz words to frame Diversity 2.0: structural inequality, power differentials, status, disenfranchisement, lack of an empowered voice, and, on the national level, "ethnic fractionalization." With all that these words bring up, can you imagine that company parties would meet the level of challenge highly diverse groups face?

Professor Phillips presented her hypothesis that on the national level, female leaders are particularly fit to confront the challenges of Diversity 2.0.  Working with Susan Perkins and Nicholas Pearce, Phillips conducted a nation-wide experiment. The subjects were presented with two different scenarios describing the fictional country Elmoa. Elmoa is either highly diverse, with many different ethnic groups making up the constituency, or has low diversity, with one dominant group making up the significant majority of the population. With very little other information, who do you think should be the next leader: David or Marsha? Who would be the most effective leader? Who will help improve ethnic inequalities?

How do you think the test subjects answered? Interestingly, they chose Marsha as the next leader, who would be the most effective and also improve ethnic inequalities.  This was true for both the highly diverse Elmoa, and the low diversity Elmoa. The key finding is the difference between the two candidates: Marsha would be the most effective leader in either scenario, but only by 10 percentage points in the low diversity Elmoa, and by nearly 60 percentage points in high diversity Elmoa.

Okay, great. So now we know something about how test subjects would vote for and rank hypothetical nondescript candidates in a fictional country; how does this translate into real life?

Professor Phillips and her team did not stop their analysis here. They took their hypothesis to real-world data collected on national female leaders who served from 1950-2004. The good news? The number of female leaders has quadrupled in the last fifty years. The bad news? Female leaders were only 5% of all leaders during this time, and some of these were queens. Phillips removed those with royal regalia from the analysis.

How did these female leaders perform, especially in countries with high diversity and high levels of political and social difficulty? Pretty well, it seems. One way to measure performance is growth in GDP. Running statistical tests, Phillips and her team found that women leaders did indeed have a measurable effect in positively improving GDP growth in highly diverse, difficult-to-manage countries.

Does this mean that you should boycott company parties, believing in their futility, until you get a female CEO? Probably not. Does it mean that highly diverse nations with many social and economic difficulties are destined to struggle more if their leader is a man? Certainly not. These findings offer a beam of light onto the questions of gendered leadership style - actual and perceived - and outcomes. They offer information, and questions to keep the conversation alive and moving.


Valerie Kane is an MPP Candidate at the Harvard Kennedy School.

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.

Gender Quotas Boost Achievement for Girls, New Study Finds

January 12, 2012
By Doug Gavel
Published in the HKS News

Rohini Pande, Mohammed Kamal Professor 

of Public Policy

"Our study shows that, in the Indian context, 
the positive effect of exposure to a female 
leader dominated any possible backlash, 
probably because it gave women a chance 
to demonstrate that they are capable leaders," 
writes Pande.

The use of gender quotas to achieve equal opportunity is a controversial political strategy, but one that seems to be achieving positive results in India. A new research paper co-authored by Harvard Kennedy School Professor Rohini Pande finds that the system designating female leaders for selected village councils in India has resulted in substantive gains for girls in those villages -- both in terms of aspirations and educational outcomes.

"Female Leadership Raises Aspirations and Educational Attainment for Girls: A Policy Experiment in India" is published in the January 12th edition of the journal Science.

In their research the authors analyzed data gleaned from more than 8000 surveys of adolescents and their parents in almost 500 villages, a third of which are randomly selected to reserve a seat for a female leader, called a "Pradhan," on the village council. The data showed that, "compared to villages that were never reserved, the gender gap in aspirations closed by 25% in parents and 32% in adolescents in villages assigned to a female leader for two election cycles."

The authors also conclude that girls raised in villages with a female Pradhan were more likely to score higher in school exams than girls from other villages, while test scores for boys remained roughly the same.

"These results show that laws can help create role models by opening opportunities that were previously unavailable to a group, and this increased opportunity does not diminish the aspirations of those outside the group," the authors argue. "Our study shows that, in the Indian context, the positive effect of exposure to a female leader dominated any possible backlash, probably because it gave women a chance to demonstrate that they are capable leaders. And, perhaps most importantly, our study establishes that the role model effect reaches beyond the realm of aspirations into the concrete, with real educational and time-use impacts."

The study is co-authored by Lori Beaman, Department of Economics, Northwestern University; Esther Duflo, Department of Economics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology; and Petia Topalova, International Monetary Fund.

Rohini Pande is Mohammed Kamal Professor of Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School. Her research examines how the design of democratic institutions and government regulation affects policy outcomes and citizen well-being, especially in South Asia. She has taught at Yale University, MIT and Columbia.