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.