Mobile Edition
Print
Get the Mag
Weekly Updates[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
Using the actual words of senior corporate executives speaking about the leadership performance of their colleagues, the authors document the extent to which gender figures in performance evaluation at this level, putting women at a disadvantage. The research illustrates the challenges that women face in accommodating themselves to male-defined executive roles and suggests how corporate leaders--men in particular--can make these detrimental effects discussable within their own executive suites.
Most companies' HR policies these days teach that performance matters above all and that gender is not a factor in employees' evaluation and advancement. But listen to what executive men and women say in private about senior corporate leaders for a very different story, one in which gender plays a central role. The official position suggests a level playing field; the personal conversation reveals that gender-based assessment of leadership creates a tilt that works against women.
Many forces, organizational and personal, create these dual realities. Our purpose for writing is not to explain why the private and public stories differ; instead, we validate the existence of the personal story, which is normally hidden. The unearthing of this concealed story may help answer important questions about why, despite the good-faith efforts of so many, women remain scarce in the highest ranks of corporations (The New York Times, Dec. 17, 2006). Helfat, et al. (2006), report that roughly 50 percent of the firms in the Fortune 1000 had no women as top executives as recently as 2000 and that even those with women executives had only one or two per firm.
Our research documents that male and female executives know that gender comes into play when they evaluate women's leadership; we have a record of their actual words speaking this truth. Our findings are not likely to surprise anyone who occupies the executive suite or, presumably, others familiar with corporate life. What is different about our research is that it reveals the extent to which gender figures in discussions of women's leadership, providing a glimpse of executives' true thoughts. Further, we point to the challenges that women face as a result of such gender-based conceptions of leadership and suggest that the path to correct these biases begins with having corporate leaders admit such biases exist and have constructive conversation about their meaning and effect.
We gained access to the private thoughts of these executives through our work as leadership consultants to men and women in the upper ranks of corporations that appear among the United States' most admired businesses. As part of a typical consultation, we interview our clients' bosses, peers, and subordinates, asking generic questions about leadership, such as:
1. What are the executive's strengths and weaknesses?
2. How good is she at strategic thinking?
3. How effective is he operationally?
We record their verbatim comments and feed back to our client the precise comments we heard. Interviewees know they speak for the record, but without personal attribution.
As we worked with more women, we noticed that the topic of gender came up repeatedly in discussions of their leadership, even though we had not asked about gender. No one commented explicitly on gender when discussing men's leadership.
Many of the comments about women's gender were quite explicit. For instance:
The women receiving such feedback were not naive, having worked their way up the corporate ladder. Nonetheless, they were shocked to see such unvarnished statements about the salient role their gender played in others' evaluation of their leadership performance.
Eventually our anecdotal evidence mounted, showing that these examples were not exceptions, nor tied to any one company. We undertook this study to determine systematically the extent to which feedback about women executives' performance included comments about their gender and to explore comparable data for men. We also wanted to understand the implications of any differences we might find.
Having done the research, we believe that we have in hand the first significant body of evidence from senior managers themselves about what they really think about gender and leadership. Our work builds upon and validates a body of experimental research on leadership and gender, which was based primarily on experiments usually conducted with college students or with mid-level managers (Valian, 1998). In those studies and ours, the key findings point to gender-based criteria as powerful influences in the evaluation of women's leadership performance (Biernat, 2003; Eagly & Karau, 2002; Fletcher, 2004; Heilman, 2001; Heilman, et al., 2004; Valian, 1998).
That leadership is conceived of in stereotypically masculine terms has been well documented in the literature for years (Eagly & Karau, 2002; Schein, 1973; Heilman, et al., 1989). This notion persists today, despite the somewhat greater representation of women in leadership roles and despite little compelling evidence that gender inherently offers a significant advantage, particularly in business settings (Eagly & Carli, 2003; Powell, et al., 2002; Vecchio, 2002, 2003). Women executives report that gender-based stereotypes continue to be a significant barrier to their advancement, although they note some improvement in recent years (Catalyst, 2003).
The bias toward a masculine model of leadership becomes especially pronounced in the corporate executive suite. There, men have always greatly outnumbered women, and men and women alike eschew "feminine" behavior, because it conflicts with and, perhaps, threatens time-honored ideas about "good" leadership. For senior executives especially, job expectations trump gender expectations, with the result that the behavior of male and female executives turns out to be more similar than it is different (Barnett & Rivers, 2004; Eagly & Johnson, 1990; McNatt, 2000); however, like behavior does not equate to like treatment. Men in society at large are more likely to be perceived as having higher status and being more competent than women. Such group-based evaluations ineluctably infiltrate the executive suite, embedded as it is in the wider culture, benefiting men and penalizing women, whose success contradicts the expected order (Alderfer, 1986; Ridgeway, 2001).
As the seat of power, the executive suite is closely guarded. Biernat (2003) demonstrated that gender-linked expectations become even more pronounced in such settings. At lower levels, women's performance may be evaluated more leniently: "for a woman, she is really good." This leniency effect is less likely to occur when judgments are made for hiring and promotion, so that when it comes to picking the senior team, women will be seen categorically as less able than men to succeed in (male-defined) executive roles. This "shifting standards" model of stereotyping, as Biernat named it, may explain why gender bias is particularly problematic as women ascend to the highest corporate levels.
How We Conducted the Study
The Sample
We analyzed qualitative 360-degree feedback that was collected about 44 executives (22 women and 22 men) who were in the senior ranks of their businesses. We matched the men and women based on their company, organizational level (vice president and above), functional area, age, and experience. The median age for the group was 47 (ranging from 35 to 64). Two were women of color and 20 were white women. Twenty-one of the men were white; one was a man of color.
The 44 executives represent 11 global companies headquartered in the United States, located predominantly in the Northeast, Midwest, and Northwest. The companies represent eight industries:
1. Computer;
2. Computer software;
3. Consumer products;
4. Energy;
5. Financial;
6. Leisure and entertainment;
7. Network communications;
8. Telecommunications/cable.
Data Analysis
We used data collected through phone or face-to-face interviews with 737 individuals commenting about the leadership performance of these 44 executives. We coded individual interviews by sex of the interviewee and their relationship to the subject (i.e., superior, peer, direct report, board).
To analyze the content of the transcripts, we used a content analysis software package to select passages with key words identifying "gendered comments." We selected words that denote gender (e.g., woman/man, feminine/masculine, husband/wife) or those that reflect cultural labels for men or women such as "cocky" or "bitchy." We matched pairs of words for each sex, although some words apply to both sexes, such as "sex" or "role model."
Three researchers (two women and one man) read the sorted data and independently identified key themes, analyzing female and male data separately. We counted the number of gendered comments that appeared in each of the interviews to determine the prevalence of gendered comments in the men's data versus what appeared in the women's data, and to evaluate which level of interviewee--boss, peer, direct report--used gendered comments most often. We also noted the sex of the persons making the gendered comments and the sex of the interviewer. In determining the final number of comments, we eliminated "benign" comments that did not have significance when examined in context.
Results
Women's Gender Stands Out
Time and time again, when asked to talk about a male executive's leadership, executives discussed only his leadership, with no explicit reference to gender. When asked to talk about a female executive's leadership, they explicitly discussed her gender--although, as stated, our questions never mentioned it. For instance, when a male CEO mused about possible successors, he made this comment about the only woman on his team:
FEED