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Article Excerpt
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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:
I see that the CEO and the COO are intimidated by her. If you peel it back, they are frightened by a senior, corporate, vice-president female that is the brightest in the company. They pinch up ... They are trying to get better at how to manage senior-level, bright females; it is new to them. (male speaking about a female peer and her male bosses) There are people around here who don't treat each other well and especially don't treat women very well. She has had to put up with stuff that nobody should have had to put up with ... We have a glass ceiling, failure mode for women. We have a mold of acceptable styles and an old-boys club, and women are held to a higher standard. I believe the stories she has told me and they are shocking. We are generally not a good place that models behavior for treating diverse styles well. (male boss speaking about a female direct report) I'll rate her performance a nine on a ten-point scale. The only reason I didn't give her a ten is that she could be more of a chameleon and fit in with the old guard, even though it would be hard because she is a woman. (male direct report rating his female boss's effectiveness) She is forceful. Usually I don't care for that in a woman, but I admire that in her immensely. (male boss commenting on his direct report)
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...
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