Speaking of Psychology - The Challenges Faced by Women in Leadership with Alice Eagly, PhD

Episode Date: September 9, 2020

With U.S. Senator Kamala Harris as the Democrats’ choice for vice presidential nominee, the challenges faced by female political candidates are back in the news again. This year is the 100th anniversary of women winning the right to vote in the United States, but true equality for women remains elusive in politics, business and many other areas. Alice Eagly, PhD, an emeritus professor of psychology at Northwestern University, discusses her research on the psychology of gender, including sex differences and similarities in leadership and how the public’s views on women in leadership roles have changed over time.  Links Alice Eagly, PhD Music Unpretentious Reveal by Drakensson via Freesound.org Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

2020 is the 100th anniversary of women winning the right to vote in the United States, yet full equality for women in this country remains elusive. Yes, U.S. Senator Kamala Harris is the Democratic nominee for vice president, which is certainly significant. Yet she's only the second black woman ever to be elected to the U.S. Senate, which has only seen 57 female members since the dawn of our country. Only one quarter of the Senate is female today, while the much larger House, with 435 members, is 235 members, is 23,

percent female. The number of women at the top of the business world is also scant. We have just reached an all-time high of 37 women CEOs of the Fortune 500, but that means that almost 93% of those top companies are led by men. Why has it taken so many years for women to make even these gains? What are the particular challenges faced by women who strive to be leaders? How can psychology help us better understand the factors that hold women back or push them down, or discourage them from aiming for the top. Welcome to Speaking of Psychology, the flagship podcast of the American Psychological Association that explores the connections between psychological science and everyday life. I'm Kim Mills. Our guest today is Dr. Alice Eggley, a professor of psychology at Northwestern

University who for many years has studied the psychology of gender, especially sex differences and similarities in leadership, pro-social behavior, aggression, partner preferences, and political attitudes. Dr. Egli has written numerous articles, chapters, and books on these topics. Her most recent book, Through the Labyrinth, The Truth About How Women Become Leaders, challenges the common metaphor of the glass ceiling. Welcome to speaking of psychology, Dr. Egli. I'm pleased to be here, Kim. This is not the first time a woman has been on the vice presidential ticket in this country, and women have run for president, although only once as a major party candidate.

Is there something different about what's happening now and are the reactions from the media and the public different this time around? Well, yes. I think that it was entirely expected, even demanded of a Democratic candidate, such as Joe Biden, because the support for the Democratic Party is stronger among women than men. So it really called for women being represented. And then it's a time when there's a good deal of protest and, unrest over minority issues.

And so choosing a woman of color certainly made sense to represent that community, which tends to lean Democratic, but to, you know, to call on their loyalty in this particular way. So I think it was entirely expected and generally very well received. Yeah, that's been interesting that there has not been a whole lot of backlash, I think. No. I mean, what are the characteristics that make her less of a target? She is quite qualified in the sense that she had a number of political roles in California, and she is a senator.

And so she has very good qualifications that would be normal in a male candidate. So she's qualified in that sense. she's also quite gifted as a speaker and a debater, as was displayed earlier in the hearings in the Senate. So I think she struck the public as, you know, somebody who had the toughness to be a good campaigner. So what particular challenges do women politicians face first as candidates and then once they're elected? Well, there are serious challenges that are embedded in the culture, in a sense, in terms of the way we think about leaders and the way we think about women and men. So this is well established in studies on stereotyping done by psychologists and political scientists in this case. So we know that people think women are the nicer, kind, or more compassionate sex, more sympathetic to elements.

others, better social skills, and the tougher, more agentic, we call it, more assertive, more aggressive sex. Okay, we know about that. But then people think about leaders as more agentic than communal. So they think about, you know, they have to take charge, they have to be tough, tell people what to do often. So that image is widely shared in the culture and is much more similar to men than women. So that puts women at something of a disadvantage.

And it sort of goes like that. Well, she's, you know, she's very nice. But then the butt is, you know, I don't know if she's tough enough to handle that kind of situation. Could she really hold up in a big debate, you know? Could she get people to do things? Which she have the respect and authority. And so that lingers in the culture. And so women have to overcome, in a sense, these anxieties people have.

It's not about being a good person or a competent person. It's about being a tough enough person to really take on that kind of role that demands a lot of competition and assertion. And yet, if you're too, tough as a woman, then that cuts against you as well. That's right. That's the agency paradox. So, if you're very assertive, like, so you say, well, okay, I'll be just like a man. Wrong. That doesn't really work for women. Unless, you know, it could take on qualities of being assertive to some extent, but not to go to the extremes as 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 you can see that in Kamala Harris right away. She speaks in a clear, pleasantly assertive way. she smiles a lot too and has a lot of feminine expressiveness in her gestures and voice. Not too much, but it's definitely there.

And so I think she has that blend that, in fact, works very well for women in leadership roles. You recently published a study that looked at a large body of nationally representative public opinion polling and found that women are now perceived as being just as competent as men as well as more communal, but they're seen as less ambitious. How have these views changed over the past decades?

Is this good news for women leaders today? It's mixed news. So this study was based on representative public opinion poll data where people were asked about men and women. And the data go back to 1946 and then through 2018. So it's quite a nice series. And so the way the pollsters do this is they ask a very direct question. They say like intelligence, more true of women, more true of men, or equally true. And so we do see a lot of change in that women's competence relative to men has risen.

So most Americans now say equal. But those who don't say equal are more likely to say women than men. So there. Competence leans slightly in the female direction. So that would be like being intelligent. The other change is rather unexpected to many observers, I think, or social scientists in particular, that the communion of women versus men has increased. So now it's overwhelmingly true, if you say something like sympathetic, more true of women or men.

It's women. So that has changed over time to be more extreme. And agency doesn't change. So 1946 people saw men as more aggressive and assertive than women. And they still do, and there's no significant change in that trend. So for women not to be troubled by these stereotypes, it's the agency that has to change as well as the competence. People have to see women as tough enough, and that still goes in the male direction. The competence is very helpful, you know, if anything, you know, women are somewhat more competent than men, because competence is a, you know, something people expect of leaders.

And the communion is probably not particularly effective in terms of being seen as even more communal than women in the past. Well, what do you think is different in other countries? I mean, women are still underrepresented in leadership in America, but other industrialized countries have been led by women. You can think of Germany or England or even New Zealand today. What's different there? The political scientists explain that women have better chances at a parliamentary system than a presidential system. So in a parliamentary system, you know, the executive and the legislative branches are combined because the prime minister is the head of the party that wins.

It has the majority. And so women can make their way up through good service and popularity in their own districts up the hierarchy in the party, you know, like Margaret Thatcher and a couple of others, and you can make it to the top of your party, and then, by the way, you get to be prime minister if your party is elected. They don't elect a person directly. They elect a party. But we don't have that.

We have the separate executive. And so the focus is all on this one role. And, you know, being a woman or a man, you're voting for the person. And I think that brings out the difficulties that women have even in the UK, because they're never voted for as a person when they get to be prime minister. And then the other thing, in some countries, and it happened a little bit here as an attempt, you know, there's a passing on through family, very elite family ties. And so Indira Gandhi was Nero's daughter. Right. And so some countries have that passing on.

And if there's not a male to pass it on to it, it might get passed on to a wife in some cases or, you know, to a child. Of course, we had a hint of that with the Clintons, didn't we? Almost. But it didn't. go and all was said and done. But it's not a tradition in the U.S. to do that. Exactly. There was the two bushes, so it looked like we did it, though.

But anyway, it's a stronger tradition in some other countries where it's happened at an earlier point, you know, as when Indira Gandhi was Prime Minister of India. So there are differences in the governmental system. There may be differences in attitudes, too, but it's particularly the structure of the political system, I think. I mean, we would tend to see some of those cultures as being even more sexish than the United States. Yes, yes.

But yet, like Pakistan and India and other countries have had. Right, Benazir Budo, yeah, same situation. Yeah, have had women. And they tend to have been closely aligned in the narrow elites that were in the, you know, often by blood. So in your book through the labyrinth, you challenge the notion of the glass ceiling, that solid but somewhat invisible barrier that most of us think women face when it comes to reaching the highest echelons of leadership. Why do you think that metaphor is not apt and that a labyrinth is closer to the challenges that women face? Well, there's a couple of reasons at least. One is it suggests a very solid barrier.

And I don't think it's like prejudices aren't like that. They are more fungible and malleable. And it isn't that we've never had women as, for instance, CEOs in the Fortune 500. So there are some and have been others. But the other reason, it suggests that the barrier is right near the top, right? So you move up through your career and, oh, my God, you can't. be CEO because there's this barrier at the top, next to the top. But that's not how it works in terms of careers in management or other areas that involve leadership. The challenges are

all along the way. It's in day one. You go to work as a, you know, a manager just coming in with your MBA. The challenges you have as a woman are there and they're there every day. And As you rise, there are different challenges, you know, it goes on and on. So it isn't as if you're exactly the same as men, and then near the top there's a glass ceiling. It's really a completely wrong metaphor. You know, it has some truth to it, perhaps, but it doesn't adequately represent the nature of the challenges, which are all along the way. And so that's why we propose labyrinth, that the man has a relatively straight road. You know, maybe he has some bumps along the way or whatever.

But the woman has to go through this labyrinth. So she has to be smarter, right? And she has to figure out how to overcome these challenges that she might face as a woman. She might take a wrong turn, but, you know, it's possible to turn around and go on, you know. if you're really persistent, but you've got to expect you might get confused at some time and, you know, take a wrong term. So it more represents the true complexity of women's careers in leadership than a glass ceiling does. You published a meta-analysis in 2011 that examined the extent to which stereotypes of leaders are culturally masculine. Can you talk about those findings and whether these stereotypes have changed in the intervening years?

Right. We did publish a meta-analysis. It involved actually three underlying types of studies that had looked at the leader stereotype. The most famous paradigm was started by Virgin Shine, and it's called the Think Manager, Think Male paradigm. It started first in 1973. And in that study, there are three groups of participants. One rates women, one rates men. and one rates managers or leaders. And they do it on a long list of traits.

And then they correlate these ratings, the men group to the leader group and the woman group to the leader group. And they find the male leader correlations are much higher than the woman leader correlations, which is just what we said before. People think that leaders are, you know, masculine and assertive.

And some men are more like leaders than women are. And so that's why I got called the think manager think male paradigm. And so it started in 1973 so we could look at it over many years. And we did find some shift. And that was the woman leader's relationship. There was some gain in thinking that leaders had more feminine characteristics, that is, in particular more social skills. So the notion of leader had changed so that, yes, people continued to think that leaders need to be tough and assertive, but by the way, they should be somewhat socially skilled.

And so it was a hint of androgyny coming in, but still the masculine characteristics won out over the feminine, even in the most recent study. So it was a shift that would be welcoming to women, this growth of adrogyny, but it didn't go all the way to androgyny. It just was some addition of the social skills, sympathy, empathy kind of thing to what people expect for leaders. You've also looked at differences in pro-social behaviors between men and women. How are they different and how are they the same? Pro-social behavior, you know, encompasses a lot of different kinds of behaviors. And so we found that both sexes engage in pro-social behavior, a lot of it. So they're similar engaging in this class of behaviors, but they tend to specialize to some extent in different aspects.

And one of the things we were interested in, in particular, was pro-social behavior where the helper puts him or herself at some risk. And that was interesting because there was a lot of differentiation. So men are more likely to do physically dangerous acts to save other people's lives, such as saving somebody from drowning, running into a burning building and pulling out somebody, intervening in a crime setting where the criminal has a gun. so these are truly life-threatening and although women sometimes do these things it's considerably less likely but another thing that has some danger is living kitten donation

you know giving your kidney you're a perfectly healthy person and this person's kidneys have given out and would you jump up and say well you can have mine that's not an easy decision because it involves not actually a lot of risk but it involves an operation and some some real risk to your health and whatever and we find women are more likely to do that it's to give parts of their body it's often done in family it's within families because the more you're genetically matched, you know, the safer it is for the person who receives it. But women are more likely to, and highly disproportion for giving to a spouse, women are much more likely to give to a husband than husband is to a wife. That's pretty amazing. So there's a dangerous

kind of helping behavior, but it's somewhat female dominated. So other calls, other You know, volunteer organizations, such as doctors and nurses who go into dangerous situations and that kind of thing. Women are very well represented in those kinds of organizations, even though they're so brisk. Of course, there's a higher proportion of women nurses. Yeah, but both nurses and doctors and even psychologists are needed in those situations. because they're traumatic. Sure. So another thing we looked at,

it took quite a lot of time to gather all the available data, was Holocaust rescuing by non-Jewish persons, which happened in the occupied countries of Europe. And there were records. They're actually kept by Yad Vashem, which is an organization in Israel. And they are held at the Holocaust Museum in Washington, from which we got the records, from which we could classify the people by nationality and sex. And we found women slightly overrepresented.

Often you couldn't tell because it was a couple, you know, but then when there was individuals recognized for having represented. There was a slight over-representation of women. And this was extremely dangerous, particularly in Poland. The rescuers were just sent to the camps, or even killed, right away. So it was a very dangerous act. So what did we think? We thought as an overall description that women tended to be overrepresented when there was a very deeply relational kind of act as giving your kidney to another person. That's very deeply

relational. And the Holocaust rescuing often was too because, you know, it would be a co-worker or a knock on the door and you had to let people into your house and hide, you know, in the Anne Frank case to hide them. So this was very deeply relational. And so the women were somewhat overrepresented when the helping was of this type. And men were more overrepresented when the act demanded, often physical strength, of course, and some sudden action of rescue in a dangerous situation and stranger rescue. You know, the person that's out there drowning is often not in your family. But you know, you're at the beach and it becomes apparent.

So that kind of stranger rescuing, demanding the very sudden decision, and often there was a, you know, could be a physical element in strength being an advantage that men are overrepresented. So there was some gendering on all of this. Yeah, but it makes sense. I mean, especially if, I mean, a woman may say, oh, I'd like to run into that burning building and save those children, but I don't think I can, I could physically do it. Yeah, you're not sure you could be a man or a grown person in there. And you couldn't. And they are trained, of course, but firefighters. But ordinary people sometimes do those things, too, you know, not just the firefighter.

Sure. Well, let's step back for a minute and look at the big picture, because you've spent your career looking at differences and similarities between men and women. And during those years, there have been a lot of cultural changes. There are more women in the workforce today. men are beginning to question the societal expectations for them to be tough and aggressive. The Me Too movement has rendered some behaviors unacceptable. Are men and women, do you think, changing intrinsically through these upheavals? Are the differences narrowing between what American society considers masculine and what it considers feminine?

Wow, that is a very big question. certainly women have changed profoundly by most women moving into the labor force into a whole range of roles so women have had to their lives have changed but if you look at that labor force it's pretty segregated so women tend to be in roles that are communally demanding nursing and teaching and social work, all women are overrepresented. You can say, well, yeah, but what about those other roles they've gone into? Like their lawyers and doctors, too, aren't they? Yes.

But then there's an internal segregation. So look at public interest law. You'll see a whole lot of women and family law, a whole lot of women. And you look at medicine. it's obvious which specialty is most female-dominated. Pediatrics. And, of course, gynecology and psychiatry. There are a lot of women.

So, again, in the more communally demanding areas, and in management, in business, you could also guess which areas most female-dominated. human resources and public relations, which demands, you know, the social skill to go out there and represent your country. So there's, at some deep level of communion and agency, there's less change than people perhaps think because of the segregation not only between occupations, but within occupations at the kinds of sub-specialties, the women versus the men take on. So, yes, there's been enormous change.

And we see in the stereotypes what's certainly ought to be there, which is the rise of women's communion. Because after all women are more educated now, you know, the men, many more college degrees. And even the Ph.D. goes slightly in the female direction now. So there's an enormous change in a kind of education, therefore, which produces knowledge and competence of that type. And so that's an enormous change of women becoming like men in that sense, but overtaking them. So that's fantastic. But there's this underlying agency of communion, the Yid and Yang dynamic, that we still see in the data. And so we don't know what exactly that comes from.

You know, there's the nature-nurture question there. Right. So do you have any words of wisdom for those American women who are hoping someday to be president or CEO of a Fortune 500 company? What can they do in our current culture to improve their odds of success? Well, one thing we see, particularly in politics, in running for office, the women are more qualified in the sense they have more past experience in education that's relevant to the job. They become overqualified in terms of those kinds of criteria. I'm not sure the extent to which that's true in business, but I wouldn't be surprised. So the idea would be don't skip on the qualifications.

If most of those people have MBAs, get one and get one from the best place you can get one from. And then if you want to go into politics, okay, when you're young, you've got to get started. When you're in college, go to the Republican or Democratic society for the students and try to get into leadership roles. and then volunteer for campaigns. You know, get the knowledge, get the contacts. Because they're probably going to be more important in general for the woman than the man. We find that in politics it's harder for women to get the support and money for the campaign than it is for men. So you've got to get well-networked to compete.

so the root may be a little harder therefore you have to bring more to bear so don't skimp on it don't think you could skimp on it so to get in there and get the kind of background that's as ideal as possible so that's very important and then

you do need to keep in mind the double mind this is what we talked about before but another name is the double bind that as a woman you're expected to be communal to be kind and caring and you know nice and as a man you're as a as a leader rather you're expected to be able to take charge and to be assertive and you know to be able to argue with people and hold your own um so there's both of those things the men can just do the latter you know but the woman have to to be successful, ordinarily have to bring the communion along. Because it's very important for them to be liked.

Men can get away often with not being so liked. But the woman, if she's disliked, it's, you know, I think that was part of Hillary Clinton's problem. A lot of people disliked Trump, but a lot of people disliked Hillary. And I think that was a worse, that was more of a disadvantage for it. her because she's a woman. Yeah. And so, you know, to keep in mind the double bind and that you will have to negotiate it. And there's smart ways to do it.

I think Kamala Harris, insofar as I've seen her on television, is doing a good job with that. You know, so look at women who appear to be doing a good job as role models. Yeah, and then persistence. Because you're in that labyrinth, you mean. Take a wrong turn, don't give up. Yeah, don't give up, right. Yeah, just learned from it, you know, things go bad. In all charisma, many things I've done, I wish had gone better or I did something wrong, but, you know, I hung in there.

So that's important in all careers. but if you're in a career that has a labyrinth, then it's even more important. You know, you could get discouraged, but take a deep breath and learn from it and go on. Yeah, so I think, you know, I admire women who do make it through to these leadership roles. I think it took, because I think on the average it just takes more skill than it did for the man in leadership. ship, you know. He wouldn't be so much tested and questioned as to whether he could do the job. Sounds a little unfair, but I guess you just have to put up with that, right? It's unfair, but it's like you also have a burden for the people become, the women become

come along later, you know. So we could be thankful for Hillary Clinton. Yeah. Yeah. That she was there and got people used to her. who shouldn't win, but she won the popular vote. Hey, come on now. So the women that come next, like Kamala Harris, I think, have an easier time because of her and other women in politics. So, yeah, so we have to think it's unfair, but it's not as unfair as it was earlier because they were there. and I hope to make it less unfair for the women who come next.

That's a good way to look at it. Well, Dr. Agley, thank you so much for joining me today. This has been really interesting and just a very almost a fun conversation to have. Thank you, Kim. I enjoy talking with you. You can find previous episodes of Speaking of Psychology on our website at speakingofpsychology. Or wherever you get your podcasts. If you have comments or ideas for future podcasts, email us at speaking of psychology at APA.

That's Speaking of Psychology, all one word, at APA.org. Speaking of Psychology is produced by Lee Weinerman. Our sound editor is Chris Kondayan. Thank you for listening. For the American Psychological Association, I'm Kim Mills.