HokieTalks: How Gender Shapes Women’s Path to Leadership

[00:00:00] >> But thank. You Thank You All right we're starting a little activity. I'm going to ask you a question and I want you to turn to your neighbor and give the first response that pops into your head. Right. When I say the word leader what's the first trait or characteristic you think of God. [00:00:33] It's OK if you didn't say the same thing. OK Raise your hand. If the tree you said was helpful. Put him up there nurturing. Understanding I got one too. These are treats that we typically associate with women. Now put your hand up if you said to us I says. [00:01:08] Confident visionary. People up there. Beings are the treats that we most typically associate with men. So what my research shows is that there's a match between the qualities we associate with leaders and the qualities possessed by men and there's a mismatch between the qualities possessed by leaders and the qualities possessed by women so people literally have in their head ideas cognitive structures about what leaders are like and when we watch someone who's trying to be a leader we're looking to see if that person's behavior matches what's in our head. [00:01:58] And if that person's behavior doesn't where that person doesn't fit even if they're trying to act decisive it's really hard to identify that person as a leader. So what's one reason why we have the ideas or images of leaders that we do I'm going to give you one example in preparing this talk I did a google search top leaders. [00:02:26] Here's what I saw. Men. Well there's a woman. There somewhere there's another one somewhere there's one over here there's one over there. They're in their teen years. But what you see are mostly men and the few cases women who mostly act like men haven't so our image our idea of what leaders are like are shaped by the readers we see around us. [00:03:08] So we want to understand why people have the associations with leaders that they do so in my research lab we use three different approaches to study that one is is a is a methodology very similar to what we did in our quick exercise we asked research participants to list characteristics of leaders list characteristics of women list characteristics of men we quantify all those characteristics and look at the relationships the correlations between those lists of characteristics finding a match for men in and leaders and not a very strong correlation between the characteristics of leaders and women. [00:03:52] The second way we try to study these associations is to bring research participants in the lab and so in the lab we have people watch the behavior of leaders and describe OK their reactions to that and what we find is that when even when a man and a woman read from the same script and see the same words only the man's leadership potential is recognized Let me repeat that even when a man and a woman say the city words reading from the scene script only the man is identified as a leader. [00:04:38] The third way my research team studies this and this is with colleagues across the world is to use drawings. And so we have a database of hundreds and hundreds of drawings from first graders through executives for Fortune five hundred companies. We use a very simple prompt draw a leader. [00:05:05] And in doing so I'm going to show you tell you a quick story using representative drawings from different age ranges so here we go. This second grader. As with most elementary school teachers when you say draw a leader they draw their mom or they drive teacher. It's clear when you talk to the kids that they think leaders can be either male or female that gender doesn't matter and when you say well why did you draw your mom or why did you draw your teacher they say well. [00:05:42] Moms and teachers take care of kids and if kids have a problem they know how to solve it. So a pretty good definition of a leader if you ask me. This third grader was very helpful pointed out the leader OK. In the front leaving boys and girls. So that's what elementary school children typically draw but the pictures change when we get to middle school. [00:06:15] Here the drawings by both boys and girls are decidedly masculine and so they're either they're drawing guys or they're drawing famous historical figures or sports figures that are on them and that trend continues in in college. And in my research is truly example fide. By executives So why do we use pictures. [00:06:54] Because we're trying to get at the associations a little more indirectly And so if I go back to this picture and I would go to the student who drew it and I said so totally about this leader what. Did you draw from me do you know woman. Leaders leaders can be man or women so when we ask explicitly everybody gives the answer that gender doesn't matter but overwhelmingly once we get out of elementary school people draw all men as leaders So what can we do about it and why do we care so why do I care. [00:07:39] Whether people associate leadership with male characteristics. And what can we do about it the first why do we care. Is that organizations today are different the flatter the more teen beast and women bring a set of characteristics and leadership styles to the table that are more useful in today's organizations and women are more transparent. [00:08:08] They are seen as more ethical. They are better at developing people and they collaborate. And what research finds is that organizations who are led by women make more ethical decisions and in times of crisis people prefer female leaders. So by opening up the pool of potential leaders. To women as well as men we're going to be able to take advantage of new styles of leadership and new ideas so how do we go about changing people's associations between leadership and gender the absolutely positive best way is for it to exp