What Does A Leader Look Like?

Here are some excerpts of articles I've been reading lately about attitudes about gender and leadership. If you'd like to see more of these, please subscribe to my newsletter.

"Because of widely held societal beliefs about gender roles and leadership, when most people are asked to picture a leader, what they picture is a male leader.  Even when women and men behave in leaderly ways among peers — speaking up with new ideas, for example — it’s men who are seen as leaders by the group, not women. And as our study shows, even in this era of talent management and diversity and inclusion initiatives, our formal feedback mechanisms are still suffering from the same biases, sending subtle messages to women that they aren’t “real leaders”— men are." (The piece immediately below is another take in a different publication on the same study, with the important difference that it offers some evidence-based suggestions to minimize bias in performance evaluations.)

"Across industries, senior management is desperately trying to retain talented women. Too often, these women receive formal and informal messaging that they neither belong nor fit, and they are penalized for their authentic leadership style. There are high costs associated with employee turnover, and overwhelming evidence suggests that businesses’ bottom lines increase by as much as 15 percent with more gender-diverse leadership teams in senior management, the C-suite, and the boardroom. Reducing evaluation bias is a business imperative."

"Employers favor men not because they are prejudiced against women, but because they have the perception that men perform better on average at certain tasks, according to the research paper When Gender Discrimination Is Not About Gender (pdf). 'We find ample evidence of discrimination against women, as employers are significantly less likely to hire a woman compared to an equally able man,' the paper says. “This discrimination, however, does not appear to be driven by gender-specific stereotypes or animus.” The findings may help employers train recruiters to be aware of their biases and work around them."