Virginia Sapiro

It was one of those pleasant receptions at the end of the academic term when most people are in a congratulatory mood. Nearing the end of my first year as dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at Boston University, I was still making the rounds of first meetings with friends of the university and found these events especially interesting. A colleague introduced me to an elderly alumnus. He looked at me and beamed, remarking, “It’s so wonderful that we don’t have to push diversity the way so many other universities do. Diversity comes naturally to us. It’s so great that you’re dean of the college.” I beamed back at him and agreed. “Yes, diversity is one of the things I love about this place. Why, in my college alone we have twenty-five different departments. So many different fields, so many different ways of thinking about knowledge, such a rich diversity of scholarship and teaching! I just love it!” I added a cheery grin for good measure. He looked a bit confused, while the women standing with us suppressed their relief and amusement.

Although I have devoted much of my research career to exploring the psychology of gender, politics, and political leadership, I am still startled and disappointed when incidents like this one validate my research findings on gender stereotypes and prejudice. Women in traditionally male-dominated leadership positions and those who aspire to leadership are never far from reminders that others see their gender as an especially salient aspect of who they are. It is often necessary and appropriate to recognize gender and the role it plays in a person’s life and career. But too often, a colleague’s focus on gender serves as a distraction, creating a special barrier in the obstacle course of a successful leadership career.

My friend at the reception shouldn’t have looked at me and seen “diversity.” Women’s presence in almost all major higher education leadership positions has increased dramatically over the past twenty years, and women are now more visible among university leaders than they were a generation ago. At least fourteen of the sixty-two Association of American Universities member institutions have had a female president since 1978, when Hannah Holborn Gray ascended to the presidency at the University of Chicago following her fourteen-month stint as acting president at Yale University. The percentage of all American college and university presidents who are women rose from 9 percent to 23 percent between 1986 and 2006 (American Council on Education 2007). While this is a notable increase, women presidents are not commonplace, and both research and the experience of women university leaders suggest that the culture and climate in which we make our careers still casts a negative light on our gender.

Research on gender and leadership in corporate, political, and higher education settings underscores the existence of a political psychology of gendered power relations. Even when women enter significant positions of leadership, gender stereotyping and prejudice constrain the scope of their action and influence. This is particularly true in complex organizations like universities, where perceptions and interpersonal relationships are critical to successful leadership. University executives must weigh sets of alternative strategies, tactics, and responses in consequential matters where they have multiple constituencies, imperfect knowledge, and often-insufficient resources to accomplish intended goals. In this high-pressure setting, gender-based reactions to women leaders may place extra burdens on them, creating what many researchers have labeled a “double bind” or “no-win” situation.

In her 1995 book, Beyond the Double Bind: Women and Leadership, Kathleen Hall Jamieson opened with a classic and fitting example of the double bind: a test of whether a woman was a witch. “The suspected witch was submerged in a pond. If she drowned, she deserved to; if she didn’t, she was a witch. In the first case, God was revealing her nature; in the second, the devil. Under torture, women either did or did not admit to complicity with Satan. If they did, they were executed for their crime. If they didn’t their silence was attributed to solidarity with Satan and they too were marched off to the stake” (Jamieson 1995). Jamieson’s book (which opened with the chapter “Hillary Clinton as a Rorschach Test”) marshaled research and observation of contemporary and historic women to argue that women in or seeking political office often find themselves in a “damned if you do and damned if you don’t” situation. Jamieson observed that the political climate pushes women to transcend the traditional bind of femininity, in which women who follow male-coded leadership models risk being perceived as too “masculine,” “hard,” and “unlikeable,” while “feminine” women risk the charge that they lack the appropriate characteristics for leadership.

A recent publication by Catalyst, a nonprofit research and advocacy organization aimed at promoting gender inclusiveness in business, reconfirmed Jamieson’s findings. In 2007, Catalyst published a report based on surveys of men and women in corporate leadership titled The Double-Bind Dilemma for Women in Leadership: Damned if You Do, Doomed if You Don’t (Catalyst 2007). This report indicated that women face extreme stereotyping that leaves them a narrow path to tread as leaders. Women leaders who seem to conform to feminine stereotypes are likely to face the perception that they are “too soft,” while women who seem to conform to masculine stereotypes likewise risk seeming “too tough.” Moreover, women must meet higher standards of competency than men, and they find it more difficult than men to gain their peers’ regard as both competent and likeable (while men find it possible to be both).

The Consequences of Gender Stereotyping

Experimental studies have illustrated how these gender biases subtly affect evaluations of women’s competency. Martha Foschi (2000) conducted a series of experiments to examine how a job candidate’s gender impacts how others assess his or her competence for high-level positions. She found that evaluators set higher standards of competence for women than for men. This was particularly true when their judgments involved comparisons among people, but not when they judged the candidates individually. She also found that evaluators held women to higher standards than men when the candidate pool showed generally average performance, but that woman benefited from their gender when the candidate pool was generally outstanding. Moreover, she found that male evaluators were more likely than their female peers to use double standards that benefited men. When the gatekeepers had to justify their judgments, they were less likely to use double standards. These results suggest that double standards have very real consequences for women job applicants.

Stereotypes affect perceptions of women’s job performance after they win the job as well. In their study of how students evaluate university instructors in laboratory settings, Lisa Sinclair and Ziva Kunda found evidence of “motivated stereotyping”: students rated women who provided negative feedback (such as poor grades or harsh evaluations) as less competent evaluators than those who provided positive feedback. Men who provided positive feedback also received more positive evaluations, but the quality of feedback had at least twice the effect on how evaluators rated women as on how they rated men. These results are particularly pertinent for women in university administration, where the higher one rises in leadership, the more one evaluates others, and the more momentous one’s evaluations are. Leadership requires consequential judgments of others in the organization, and women leaders are likely to encounter particularly negative reactions to their authority.

Benevolent Sexism

These studies illustrate that sexism has many negative consequences for women in leadership positions. But sometimes sexism takes on a misleadingly positive veneer, making it more difficult to address. Women who are the first in their positions frequently encounter introductions (like the one at my university’s reception) that repeatedly underscore the novelty attached to a woman leader’s gender. Well-meaning people may emphasize how wonderful it is to have a female leader, perhaps referring to apparently benign stereotypes, such as the view that women have extraordinary compassion or “people skills.” These well-intentioned individuals often have no idea that their words reflect gender-based stereotypes and highlight their view that a woman leader is less than normal.

Psychologists have explored the existence of “benevolent sexism,” in which sexist behavior seems friendly and sometimes even positive. Men are less likely than women to interpret benevolent sexism as sexism, and women may also fail to notice it, even though research suggests that its patronizing and condescending elements have negative effects. Some studies even indicate that the negative consequences of benevolent sexism are just as great as the effects of hostile sexism, with experimental research showing that women perform more poorly in response to a supervisor’s patronizing behavior (while men tend to respond by performing better) (Vescio, Gervais, Snyder, and Hoover 2005). But women may feel less able to combat benevolent sexism than hostile sexism, as the people who enact it often seem likeable (Dardenne, Dumont, and Bollier 2007). Thus benevolent sexism places women in a particularly difficult situation. Women leaders know that they will evoke counterproductive reactions if they point out a colleague or supervisor’s benevolent sexism or patronizing behavior.

Dealing with Conflicting Demands

Women who have attained positions of leadership in traditionally male arenas have developed many strategies for coping with the gauntlet of prejudice, but these strategies often place them in an interesting feminist double bind. Many of us want to draw on our experiences as women who broke through gender-based barriers (perhaps a bit bruised, but still standing) to help the women who follow us. We want to act as mentors and change agents in our institutions, and as we do so, we may find it necessary to highlight the significance of our gender. At the same time, we wish that others were less inclined to see our work through a gendered lens. Are we asking to have it both ways? Perhaps--but it’s no wonder we are conflicted, given the complexity of the double binds we face.

When I have lectured on the political psychology of the “glass ceiling,” many audience members have recognized themselves in Claude Steele’s work on stereotype threat. Steele defines stereotype threat as “the social psychological threat that arises when one is in a situation or doing something for which a negative stereotype about one's group applies. This predicament threatens one with being negatively stereotyped, with being judged or treated stereotypically, or with the prospect of conforming to the stereotype” (Steele 1997; also Steele and Aronson 1995). Related experimental research focusing on both gender and race shows that a person may perform the same task differently depending on whether it is framed as something that people of their social group don’t normally do (or do well). A study of women’s performance in mathematics, for example, showed that women who identify strongly with women as a group performed worse on a math test that they took under conditions that could invoke stereotype threat. In other words, women who care deeply about women as a group don’t want to reinforce negative stereotypes of women. That fear alone can hurt their performance. But perhaps we can use that same group consciousness and self-awareness as a countervailing strength. Even as we recognize how fear of representing women badly may inflect our daily struggles, we become more aware of the need to resist reducing ourselves to symbols.

One way to “stay real” is to share experiences and perspectives with other women in similar leadership positions. When women leaders talk among ourselves, our conversations are full of anecdotes exemplifying the double binds we face and the strategies we use to manage them and succeed in our work. For many successful women in education leadership, the path through the challenges is the same as it has always been: to share our stories with peers and learn from each other. We are, after all, educators, and we must use our skills, experience, and wisdom to teach and help each other and those who will come after us.

References

American Council on Education. 2007. The American College President: 2007 Edition. Washington, DC: American Council on Education.

Catalyst. 2007. The Double-Bind Dilemma for Women in Leadership: Damned if You Do, Doomed if You Don’t. https://www.catalyst.org/file/45/the%20double-bind%20dilemma%20for%20women%20in%20
leadership%20damned%20if%20you%20do,%20doomed%20if%20you%20don’t.pdf (accessed May 25, 2008).

Dardenne, B., M. Dumont, and T. 2007. The insidious dangers of benevolent sexism: Consequences for women’s performance. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 93 (5): 764-79.

Foschi, M. 2000. Double standards for competence: theory and research. Annual Review of Sociology 26: 21-42.

Jamieson, K.H. 1995. Beyond the Double Bind: Women and Leadership. New York: Oxford University Press.

Sinclair, L. and Z. Kunda. 2000. Motivated stereotyping of women: She's fine if she praised me but incompetent if she criticized me. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 26 (11): 1329-42.

Steele, C.M. 1997. A threat in the air: How stereotypes shape intellectual identity and performance. American Psychologist 52 (6): 613-629.

Steele, C.M. and J. Aronson. 1995. Stereotype threat and the intellectual test performance of African Americans. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 69 (5): 797-811.

Vescio, T.K., M. Snyder, and A. Hoover. 2005. Power and the creation of patronizing environments: The stereotype-based behaviors of the powerful and their effects on female performance in masculine domains. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 88 (4): 658-72.