In part one, we explored gendered perceptions of leadership, that is, does gender have anything to do with what makes an effective leader?
We looked at how lack of fit theory, role congruity theory, expectation states theory, the think manager-think male paradigm and the double bind influence the leadership opportunities women miss out on.
Now, let’s look at what the agriculture industry misses out on when these perceived leadership capabilities are taken at face value and push effective and skilled leaders — often women — to the sidelines.
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The numbers don’t lie
- RBC’s 2019 Farmer 4.0 report noted that by 2025 (now!), one in four Canadian famers will be aged 65 or older, and over the next decade 37 per cent of the ag workforce will be set to retire.
“Moreover, Canadian youth are not looking to replace them…. To seize these opportunities, Canada needs to transform the way we produce food. The Farmer 4.0 will be innovative (tests new approaches and works with new partners), highly skilled (embraces lifelong learning, with a focus on communications), data-driven and diverse (seeks a wide range of employees, partners, suppliers to solve complex problems)” — many of the characteristics that women typically excel at (and men are beginning to use more often) as part of their leadership approach. (See part one for more about this.) - The 2016 Success for Women in Agri-Food report found that “there is an increasing trend that women are the key enablers to farm diversification and increased financial sustainability of the operation.”
- The 2020 FMC Dollars and Sense Update noted that “women are more likely than their male counterparts to adopt farm business management practices … a previous D&S report (2015) showed that adopting farm business management practices is linked to farm profitability.”
- An analysis between 2002 and 2012 of 243,269 employees at 58,832 Portuguese firms found that people working for female leaders spent 1.4 fewer extra hours on the job per month, a difference of seven per cent. (Source: Do Employees Work Less for Female Leaders? A Multi-method Study of Entrepreneurial Firms, Olenka Kacperczyk, Peter Younkin and Vera Rocha [Organization Science, 2023])
- In a 2010 study, organizational psychologist Anita Williams Woolley and her colleagues examined working groups of two to five people (699 people in total) and found the proportion of women in a group was strongly related to the group’s collective intelligence, which is their ability to work together and solve a wide range of problems.
- Amy Novotney wrote in her 2024 article “Women leaders make work better. Here’s the science behind how to promote them”: “Decades of studies show women leaders help increase productivity, enhance collaboration, inspire organizational dedication and improve fairness. Decades of psychological research confirm when women are empowered to take on leadership positions, the effects can be metamorphic for everyone.”
And more positive news: competence stereotypes have changed dramatically over the decades.
In one 1946 poll, only 35 per cent of those surveyed thought men and women were equally intelligent, and of those who believed there was a difference, more thought men were the more competent sex. (Source: www.apa.org/topics/women-girls/female-leaders-make-work-better)
In contrast, a 2018 poll showed that 86 per cent of respondents believed men and women were equally intelligent, nine per cent believed women were more intelligent, and only five per cent believed men were more intelligent. (ibid.)
A 2020 meta-analysis by Alice Eagly, professor of psychology emerita at Northwestern University and a pioneer in researching women’s leadership, found that women are now seen as equally or more competent as men. The researchers looked at three types of traits — communion (i.e., compassion, sensitivity), agency (i.e., ambition, aggression) and competence (i.e., intelligence, creativity) — and whether participants thought each trait was truer of women or men or equally true of both.
The 2023 Final Report: Expanding Opportunities for Canadian Agriculture by Understanding the Experience of Farm Women noted that “sixty-three per cent of respondents agree that agriculture in general would be better off if women were more involved in farm management.”
And the latest numbers from Statistics Canada (November 2022) show that women in ag are indeed becoming more involved:
- Female farm operator numbers increased for the first time in 30 years (2.3 per cent).
- In 2021, 30.4 per cent of Canada’s farm operators were female, up from 28.7 per cent in 2016.
- About one in seven (14.9 per cent) one-operator farms in Canada were managed by female operators in 2021, up from 11.5 per cent in 2016.
Eagly writes in her research brief Once more: The rise of female leaders, “Despite evidence of the cultural masculinity of leader roles, polls have found attitudinal shifts favourable to women leaders.
“For example, a frequent Gallup poll question asks, ‘If you were taking a new job and had your choice of a boss, would you prefer to work for a man or woman? The responses from the first presentation of this question in 1953 through the most recent poll in 2017 show a dramatic decline in the preference for male over female bosses, while indifference about the sex of the boss has increased considerably.”
Ultimately, does gender have anything to do with leadership ability? It’s not so much whether there is a perceived gender difference in leadership but when and why there may be gender differences in perceived leadership effectiveness.
So, it’s more about style than gender — but a style that more women, whether unconsciously or not, tend to use more frequently.
And it looks like a style that could pay off big.
How women see themselves
Research into perceived gender differences in leadership has explored the idea of how men and women rate their abilities as leaders (self-rating) versus how others rate them (other-rating).
For example, the research paper Gender and Perceptions of Leadership Effectiveness: A Meta-Analysis of Contextual Moderators found that men rated themselves as significantly more effective at leadership than women (self-rating) while women were rated by others as significantly more effective than men (other-rating).
“(T)he literature to date seems to oversimplify gender advantages in leadership,” the report’s authors write. “One of our key findings is that very different patterns of results occur depending on whether self- or other-ratings serve as the measure of leader effectiveness….
“(T)he extent to which the organization being examined was male- or female-dominated significantly moderated gender differences in effectiveness … male-dominated organizations (my note: e.g., agriculture) showed a tendency for men to be perceived as more effective….
“We found that for other-ratings, women were rated as significantly more effective leaders than men in business and education organizations … Our findings show that certain leadership roles (i.e., business, education) may also be seen as incongruent with men’s gender role, negatively affecting perceptions of their effectiveness … highlighting the impact role congruity theory can have on men as well as women depending on the context or situation.
“When all leadership contexts are considered, men and women do not differ in perceived leadership effectiveness. Yet, when other-ratings only are examined, women rated as significantly more effective than men. In contrast, when self-ratings only are examined, men rate themselves as significantly more effective than women rate themselves.
“(Such findings highlight the) shifting stereotypes of gender and leadership. More research (is required) to look at what factors explain why women are seen as equally or more effective leaders than men, yet they are not being rewarded in the same ways.”
