What Six Decades of Research Reveals About Women in Leadership
For 60 years, researchers have tracked attitudes toward female leaders. The latest findings suggest that beneath the undeniable progress lies a more troubling reality.
In 1965, the Harvard Business Review published a survey of 2,000 executives — both women and men — asking about their attitudes toward female leaders. Twenty years later, researchers repeated the exercise. They did so again in 2006, and have continued tracking how perceptions of women in leadership have evolved at 20-year intervals ever since.
The resulting dataset — the most recent iteration of which was just published — spans six decades, and tells two stories: one of undeniable progress, and another that is considerably more unsettling.
Compared with 60 years ago, many of the overt biases that once kept women out of senior roles have receded. Executives today are far more likely to view women as capable, effective leaders. But while attitudes have in many ways become more egalitarian, the lived experience of women vs. men in leadership remains markedly different.
The latest HBR report, conducted by three academics at Texas A&M University’s Mays Business School, drew on survey responses from 193 senior executives across a range of industries, as well as in-depth interviews.
Josie Cox
“While attitudes improved sharply between 1965 and 2006, the years since have produced a gap in how men and women experience evaluation, standards, and opportunity,” they write in the HBR article about their findings. “The divergence indicates progress on the surface, but deterioration underneath.”
Perhaps the starkest example is how women and men perceive the scrutiny faced by female leaders. In 2006, when asked whether women were judged more critically in executive roles, around 35% of men and women said they agreed. Nearly two decades later, the percentage of men who agree with that question remains virtually unchanged,while the percentage of women who agree with that question has surged to 90% — a “significant judgment gap between male and female executives,” the researchers note.
The same pattern appears elsewhere: 83% of women now say they must be more exceptional than men to succeed, compared with just 28% of men who agree with that statement. In 2006, those figures stood at 68% and 32%, respectively.
Perceptions of fairness diverge just as sharply. Only 37% of women believe promotion criteria are applied equally across genders, compared with 70% of men. And while three-quarters of male respondents see their organizations as meritocracies, only 40% of women agree.
The researchers suggest growing political polarization and the rollback of diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives as possible reasons for these gaps, as well as a heightened awareness of workplace bias among women themselves.
“Sixty years ago, the question was whether women could lead. That question has been answered,” the academics write. “Twenty years ago, the question was whether attitudes would change. They did, substantially,” they add. “Today’s questions are more precise and more difficult: Why did the perception gap widen precisely as surface attitudes improved, and what does that tell us about where change still needs to happen?”
What, indeed?
Josie Cox
