Speaking of Psychology: How women become leaders, with Alice Eagly, PhD

For decades, psychologists have been studying what makes people good leaders. But it isn’t just about possessing certain leadership traits. In this episode, Alice Eagly, PhD, talks about how stereotypes grounded in everyday psychological observations and stereotypes affect how women are perceived as leaders and how society can change those perceptions.

Alice Eagly, PhD, is a social psychologist who has published widely on the psychology of gender and social behavior. She is the author of "Sex Differences in Social Behavior: A Social Role Interpretation, The Psychology of Attitudes" and "Through the Labyrinth: The Truth About How Women Become Leaders."

Eagly is a professor of psychology at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University.

Audrey Hamilton: Hello, and welcome to Speaking of Psychology, a podcast produced by the American Psychological Association. I’m your host, Audrey Hamilton. In this episode, I talk with a psychologist about why women, particularly in the U.S., lag behind men in positions of power when research shows, as a whole, women’s leadership styles are more effective.

Alice Eagly: I can be using the perfect leadership style but unless they are willing to go along with me, I’m not as effective. So, we also know that women are undermined by people not according them as much authority.

Audrey Hamilton: From politics to the classroom, the research consistently shows women face psychological barriers on their way to the top, yet they are already overcoming many of these barriers. But, they can’t do it alone.

Alice Eagly is a social psychologist at Northwestern University who has published widely on the psychology of gender. Her book on gender and leadership called “Through the Labyrinth: The Truth About How Women Become Leaders” examines why women’s paths to power remain difficult to traverse despite a lack of evidence that female leaders are less effective than their male counterparts. Welcome, Dr. Eagly.

Alice Eagly: Thank you. I’m glad to be here.

Audrey Hamilton: There’s little doubt that women are underrepresented in the highest levels of business, government, academia. As we are recording this podcast right now, only 21 percent of U.S. senators, 19 percent of House members and eight percent of governors are women and among Fortune 500 CEOs five percent are women. As a person who studies the psychology of gender and has seen cultures shift toward more egalitarian roles, does this surprise you? Does it continue to surprise you?

Alice Eagly: Progress in some domains is very slow. But first of all, there are many areas in which women have made a lot of progress in leadership. And I think sometimes we concentrate too much on the ones that have been so slow like the Fortune 500 CEOs – it’s actually six percent now. And that shows almost no trend over time.

But, university presidents are 30 percent. That was practically zero when I was a girl. And CEOs of non-profits are 52 percent women and principals of schools are over 50 percent women. When I was a girl, I never saw a principal or heard of a principal of a school who was a woman and now it’s slightly over half. So there’s enormous progress in some domains.

The ones that are slowest are the ones with the most power and prestige and in terms of political leadership, the U.S. is enormously behind other industrialized countries. I don’t think most Americans know that because we think, oh we’re in a progressive, wonderful country and women are doing a lot better. True, but in terms of the representation of women in parliament, we rank currently 101st in the world, meaning there are one hundred nations in the world with parliaments with a greater proportion of women. That includes for instance Saudi Arabia. We’re behind Saudi Arabia and other Middle Eastern countries. So, there are multiple reasons why that’s so. Sometimes that quote is etc. But nonetheless in political leadership, the U.S. is stunningly behind other nations, most nations of the world or at least half the other nations are doing better at least on that statistic.

There are multiple reasons. There’s a broad cultural problem that I emphasize, which has to do with the way we think about women and the way we think about men and the way we think about leadership. So this is a broad frame within which to understand it. So in terms of gender stereotypes we tend to think that women are the nicer, kinder sex and more socially skilled. More emotional intelligence. Very good qualities. And then we tend to think about leaders as go-getters, people who take charge and are assertive. Yeah, some social skills, but mainly that they are what we call “agentic” in terms of the way we think about leaders. And guess what, that’s the way we think about men as the more agentic sex. There’s more of a cultural match there. You know, we think a man can do that – can take charge and with a women, well, she’s awfully nice and she’s a kind person, but we don’t know if she can exert authority. And so women are kind of behind and have something to prove.

So the domains of leadership in which women have made more progress are ones that we think of somewhat less in that way. For instance, a school principal is a go-getter type of person. No, it takes a great deal of social skill to be a principal of a school. You have those parents coming in complaining and the kids and the community. It demands a lot of skill with people. And so women have made a lot of progress there.

Audrey Hamilton: You know, it’s interesting because most teachers I think are women, right? So…

Alice Eagly: Teachers are women, which is another communally demanding occupation, particularly at the elementary schools, it’s overwhelmingly female at the elementary level where they’re taking care of children. And so then it does go along with the female qualities. And so we see that in leadership. So, particularly agentic roles might be a military general and CEO of a Fortune 500 company, yes. And so, the areas in which progress is slower tend to be those that are thought to be particularly identically demanding.

But in terms of leadership in general, leadership does take some range of skills and so women will do better where the agentic theme is not so overwhelmingly strong and it’s recognized that a good deal of social people skill is needed.

Audrey Hamilton: So, what does your own research reveal about these types of differences in men’s and women’s leadership styles? What does that mean for the organizations they do lead, for example?

Alice Eagly: I have studied leadership style in terms of meta-analyses because there are just a lot of studies. The first meta-analysis I did in leadership style, what was most robust that women are more participative in their leadership style, more relational and somewhat less top down – top down, ordering people about – you do this, you do that, would be less common among women. And the more relational participative style was more common, but that’ not you know sort of a bipolar distinction. They’re very much overlapping distributions.

Then I did another project later on because researchers had started to make new distinctions about leadership style and they were interested in transformational and transactional leadership, which is still an important theme in leadership research.

Audrey Hamilton: What’s the difference between the two?

Alice Eagly: Well, the transformational leader would lead in part by inspiration by epitomizing what’s good in the organization and inspiring people to go along with the mission – inspiring them not just to do the best but to go beyond that to give a lot to the organization and also then to build good relationships with people so that they will come along, allow themselves to be inspired, etc. Or the transactional leader would be more of a reward punishment. The raises and the reprimands and the threat of firing. So that would be a transaction. What we found was that women were slightly more transformational than men, but that that was particularly in the building of good relationships. Again, the social piece.

And in terms of transactional leadership, it wasn’t that women were less transactional, there are two subtypes. One is using reward. So you look for what people are doing right and you say that’s really good. You know, do more of that. And there’s the negative approach. You notice what they’re doing wrong and you reprimand them or worse. And so women tended to use more the positive approach, the reward approach relative to men who fell somewhat more into the negative approach. So we know as psychologists that if possible you should use a positive approach. It tends to be more effective because morale is actually improved by that. So it looked on the whole, in terms of what leadership researchers know about these styles, which have been correlated with effectiveness, the women were using somewhat more than men the more effective styles. But these differences are small. But this pattern has been replicated since in other work, so I am fairly confident of it. What we’re saying is women are delivering these slightly more effective behaviors.

But we also know that women aren’t accorded as much authority. So 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 also that women are undermined by people not according as much authority. She said that – hey. But, if he said that – ooh. Maybe I better pay attention. So that is going on. To say that just because women are using more effective behaviors, of course we want to fight stereotypes in general because they categorize people. And so, ideally we would individuate, and I would just think of your individual qualities, everybody’s individual qualities and treat them like that. But, we know that that is not how human cognition works. And once people categorize, then they associate what they observe with the category. They might see girls playing more with dolls and playing house and they might just see boys playing more with trucks and cars and guns. And so that’s there. They added it by age two. You can and to some extent use top-down control. I will think about this. You know? But we can’t be aware of everything at every moment. Life moves fast. So the fundamental way to change stereotypes is to change what people observe and then they would need to see equal distribution into occupations. The U.S. and other countries, occupational structures profoundly segregate. There are many occupations that are nearly 100 percent one sex or the other. In terms of the sociologist statistics, over half of all men and women would have to change occupations in order to have occupational parity. But we can’t get rid of the stereotypes without changing our world and that’s where we should direct a lot of our efforts. And we are.

Audrey Hamilton: So if I’m, let’s say – I have a daughter, she’s six right now. But let’s say if I’m a young woman or I’m a parent of a young woman let’s say whose listening to this and is thinking about what you’re saying and saying well this just sounds kind of hopeless. How can I change the world, right? What sort of advice would you give to those people who are thinking about how to make the changes in their own lives or let’s say their daughters’ life for instance?

Alice Eagly: Well, first of all parents are a primary model. Parents don’t realize that often they’re doing the gender stereotypes. If the woman and mom is doing more of the caring, well how could they not begin to think that women are nurturing and men are less so? And if he is doing more of the wage earning and if she is doing more of the indo work and he is doing more of the thing oriented – he’s fixing things and mowing the lawn, how could they not get the idea that men are better at mechanical things and whatever?

And so, the first things parents if they want to get rid of gender stereotypes should do is stop enacting them. Please don’t enact them, which is a tall order for a lot of people. Then they go to elementary school and the teachers are overwhelmingly female. And now the principal of the school is female. So, it’s good to expose if you’re interested in progressively eliminating stereotypes or lessening them to give children experience with the alternative and then talk to them. And you know, a lot of parents say girls can do anything. That’s kind of empty, it’s not too bad that girls can do anything. And they look at their world and they are getting different information associationally. They’re just taking in this other information all of the time about what the men and women are doing. But, we can look at areas where it’s very important that women make progress as in political power and we can concentrate on the women in the Senate, etc. and direct girls to them as role models. Because they are there and they’re not in tiny numbers anymore.

Audrey Hamilton: Okay, well Dr. Eagly, thank you so much for joining us. It’s been a pleasure.

Alice Eagly: It’s very nice to talk to you. Thank you for inviting me.

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Thanks for joining us. I’m Audrey Hamilton with the American Psychological Association and this is Speaking of Psychology.