Country Guide often writes about leadership. And we often write about women leaders in agriculture. Since 2019 we have covered the subject of women leadership in agriculture in no less than 20 articles.
As a curious journalist and a farmer who is a woman, I got to thinking about gendered perceptions of leadership.
Are there differences in how men and women lead? Why do women seem to be at a disadvantage when it comes to leadership roles? What factors contribute to someone being a good leader?
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My research started with a 2014 meta-analysis (i.e., a study that combines the data from multiple previous studies) that investigated perceptions of leadership effectiveness in terms of gender.
Researchers found four factors that contribute to the perception (note the word perception) that women are less effective leaders: lack of fit theory, role congruity theory, expectation states theory and the think manager-think male paradigm.
Let’s unpack those terms and find out what makes an effective leader — and whether it has got anything to do with gender at all.
Think manager, think man
What do you think of when you hear the word “leader”?
Probably adjectives such as “assertive” or “decisive.”
Were you also picturing a man? Maybe you didn’t even realize you were until you thought consciously about it.
Certain leadership traits are traditionally associated with men, such as dominant, strong, competent or heroic. And so, when we think manager, we think man. Culturally, around the world, leadership traits are stereotypically masculine.
Andrea Heuston wrote in Leading Like a Woman, “Historically, men are looked to, to lead. We hear about the great examples of female leadership throughout history because they were the exception, not the rule.”
Virginia Schein, an international consultant and lecturer on the subject of gender and leadership, initially examined the think manager- think male paradigm in 1973. Three groups of participants were asked to rate 92 traits of a manager as applying to “men in general,” “women in general” or as more related to “successful middle managers.” Results showed that the correlation between characteristics of a manager were more often thought of in terms of male traits.
“People think that leaders are masculine and assertive. And so, men are more like leaders than women are,” says Alice Eagly, a social psychologist who studied Schein’s work, in a 2020 podcast from the American Psychological Association.
Factors limiting leadership
Gender stereotypes, whether applied to men or women, can be descriptive (beliefs about what characteristics someone has) and prescriptive (what characteristics people believe someone should have).
Either way, they tend to harm perceptions of women’s leadership ability far more than men’s.
Double standards create various sets of rules for different people resulting in unequal treatment because those rules or principles are unfairly applied in different ways to individuals. They create a snowball effect around stereotypes: someone is treated a certain way because they are a woman, others observe and emulate that treatment, and so the cycle continues.
Stereotypes also have the effect of enforcing the double bind and ideas around role congruity, lack of fit and expectation states.
• The double bind: In psychological terms, Merriam-Webster’s dictionary says that a double bind is “a predicament in which a person receives from a single source conflicting messages that allow no appropriate response to be made.” It’s a communications paradox where the messages women receive make them feel that no matter what decision they make it will be wrong.
Go ahead and take a quick commercial break here so that you can watch Nike’s Super Bowl ad “So Win” (youtu.be/b0Ezn5pZE7o). This pretty much sums up the double bind for women in general, not just in sports.
• Role incongruity: Role incongruity is a perceived mismatch, or disconnect, between the characteristics people associate with women and the traits they feel are required of a leader. For example, research by John E. Williams and Deborah L. Best show that, globally, people expect women to be the more communal — warm, supportive and kind — and men to be more “agentic,” that is, assertive, dominant and authoritative. Many find it off-putting if a woman demonstrates those male characteristics.
The article “Women Leaders: The Labyrinth to Leadership” offers the example of Hilary Clinton. She’s skilled, confident and knows politics, but during the 2020 election people criticized her for not being warm enough.
In her book When Women Lead, Julia Boorstin writes about Victoria Brescoll’s 2010 research where Brescoll and colleagues found that “leaders in industries that are strongly associated with the opposite sex, say a female police chief or the male president of a woman’s college are more strongly penalized for making mistakes than are those in positions more closely associated with their own gender. When leaders made mistakes, women in traditionally male jobs were judged more harshly and seen as less competent than their gender congruent counterparts.”
Women can also generate a self-fulfilling prophecy: if they see themselves as incongruent with leadership roles they end up creating self-imposed perceptual barriers — even when others evaluate them as more effective. This leaves them “dangling between two opposing sets of expectations,” write Ginka Toegel and Jean-Louis Barsoux in “Women Leaders: The Gender Trap.”
• Expectation states: A 2024 research paper on www.gender.study outlines this theory as “how cultural beliefs about gender shape interactions within various social settings.” The theory explains how it’s not only an individual’s actions that affect their status with a group, but also societal expectations and stereotypes.
“These expectations, deeply rooted in culture, often affect how people are perceived in terms of competence, leadership potential and overall influence.”
Essentially, this theory helps us examine how gender influences social hierarchies, leadership and power dynamics in groups.
But as Boorstin writes, “The fact that female CEOs are unexpected and therefore underestimated often causes them to find their own ways to prove themselves and to create new archetypes of leadership.”
• Lack of fit: Negative expectations around someone’s performance stemming from a perception of unsuitability for the role (e.g., that women aren’t suited for roles/jobs which men have traditionally filled) create a perception of lack of fit for the role.
Organizations and businesses can use the lack of fit model to understand what processes drive gender discrimination in employment decisions (e.g., bumping someone up to a leadership role).
While these stereotypes and double standards create barriers, surprisingly some research shows they can provide an advantage for women: when a leader’s skills or abilities are viewed positively and as occurring in spite of some shortcoming (e.g., a woman is not enough), she is more likely to be perceived as possessing a high level of competence.
Leadership labyrinth
When it comes to leadership ability, many women have what it takes, and they know it. But Boorstin says they end up exasperated and frustrated because role incongruity, the double bind, lack of fit and expectation states put them at a disadvantage.
Despite all the influences and hindrances, however, women have developed a unique style of leadership that many men are beginning to adopt because they notice the benefits, both tangible (profits) and intangible (e.g., improved organizational performance via people development and participative decision-making).
Boorstin points to research that shows women are more likely to demonstrate divergent thinking, a growth mindset and non-hierarchical leadership, a.k.a. communal leadership or transformational leadership (as opposed to transactional). A transformational leader inspires others while a transactional style is more about reward-punishment. Psychologists have found that a positive approach that emphasizes the reward portion (i.e., transformational approach) tends to be more effective because it improves morale.
“Men can, and often do, find opportunity in these approaches,” writes Boorstin. “(Researchers) found that when male leaders acted the way female leaders were expected to act, that is, communal and co-operative, they stimulated more co-operation than if they acted in a male way. Communal behaviour fostered co-operation, and stereotypically male, authoritative behaviour squashed it … It is gendered construction of male leadership that is the issue rather than only the leader’s sex.” (Italics are mine.)
Women also have a high adaptability quotient. Boorstin writes, “Research provides clues about why women might be well equipped to lead companies through crisis; they center on the notion of adaptability. Whereas in the 1990s the business world replaced IQ with a fixation on leaders’ emotional quotient (EQ), researchers have recently found a more predictive indicator of business success: adaptability.”
And characteristics that can seem negative at first blush can play to a woman’s leadership advantage as well.
For example, Boorstin writes how the bias of “warmth” worked for women rather than against them when male and female entrepreneurs were pitching their businesses, particularly when that business was a purpose-driven company. The stereotype of women being perceived as warm benefited them with a boost in the overall evaluation.
Boorstin also writes about research conducted by UC Davis cognitive neuroscientist Mara Mather which found that when subjected to stress, men become more eager to take risks, whereas women take a more practical approach. “Women in stressful situations pursue smaller wins that are more attainable and will have less downside.”
Adapt or adopt?
Still, there are many subtle gendered characterizations of leadership and authority that penalize women.
Something as “simple” as using the words “pushy,” “bossy” and “condescending” were found by writing teacher and public scholar Nic Subtirelu to be applied to women and girls three times more frequently than to men and boys.
Eagly noted that women also aren’t accorded as much authority. “I can be using the perfect leadership style, but unless they are willing to go along with me, I’m not as effective. And so we know that women are undermined by people not according us much authority.”
So, should women adapt and adopt more masculine traits of leadership to prove themselves as leader material?
A 2022 article on The Conversation (bit.ly/418N00G) summarized research out of Montreal’s John Molson School of Business and the Stanford University Women’s Leadership Innovation Lab which explored, among other questions, “Do women need to adopt male traits and behaviours to be successful in business?”
The study revealed that a low number of female respondents (24 per cent) and male respondents (17 per cent) from Quebec think that female leaders become more masculine to progress in their careers. But when researchers looked to their European counterparts (France, Germany and Italy), 46 per cent of women and 47 per cent of men shared this belief.
“This low feeling of masculinization of Quebec women leaders is particularly important to point out, because it prevents certain leaders from becoming obstacles rather than role models for other women,” write the researchers. “Far from denying their femininity, the results of this study seem to indicate that women develop a leadership style that is unique to them.”
In her podcast interview, Eagly said, “If you’re very assertive, so you say, ‘Well, okay, I’ll be just like a man’ — wrong. That doesn’t really work for women… (it’s okay to demonstrate some) qualities of being assertive… but not to go to the extreme, which is dangerous, but add to it the qualities of warmth and kindness and empathy. So, display both. That tends to be something that works for women who are leaders or wish to be leaders.”
And because the threshold of acceptable behaviour is often lower for women, a woman who adopts an assertive command and control leadership approach is often labelled negatively. This is referred to as the “abrasiveness trap” by Boorstin. When men demonstrate this behaviour, however, they’re usually seen as a leader.
Add to this Boorstin’s observations about the chicken-and-egg situation that gender dynamics create: “Women don’t seem good at hurdle races, because they don’t often compete at hurdle races. Therefore, bettors don’t back them and therefore women have less incentive to compete in hurdle races. Women don’t seem good at being CEOs because they don’t often serve as CEOs, therefore investors and board members don’t back them.”
In male-dominated industries, organizations or businesses (such as agriculture), one meta-analysis found that men were seen as more effective leaders than women. But there’s a paradox: if you haven’t seen a woman leader in a certain industry, how would you know the difference? A woman leader can’t be treated as an equal to her male counterpart until women in that position are normalized. But it can’t be normalized until she’s in those positions.
“It’s a chicken and egg obstacle,” writes Boorstin. “None of us want to tokenize female leaders, but until there are more women running businesses, the women who are in that position will attract additional scrutiny because they are rare.”
It comes back to the friction between people’s expectations and perceptions about what women can do and what they can actually do. “This incompatibility not only restricts women’s access to organizations but can also compromise perceptions of women’s effectiveness,” Eagly writes in her research paper “Female Leadership Advantage and Disadvantage: Resolving the Contradictions.”
Even though women may typically face more challenges than men in vying for leader roles, there are signs of change. Since 2011, some gender and leadership researchers have noted a partial shift toward androgyny (i.e., having both masculine and feminine characteristics) in the leader stereotype.
And Madeleine Baerg wrote in these pages in our December 2018 issue, “Farming excellence, we’re told, is no longer predicated on the farmer’s muscle strength. Instead, success is multi-tasking, management, problem-solving — areas where women excel at least as often as men.”
The key is self-awareness: understand your leadership style and silence the inner critic that has you underestimating your leadership capabilities.
