Are Women Less Convincing or Perceivers Biased? Understanding Differential Reactions Towards Men and Women’s Intentions to Exert Influence

Two important factors for accessing leadership positions are the ability to signal leadership qualities and to be perceived by others as having such qualities. Yet, research shows that women tend to be evaluated less positively when signaling leadership, which can be explained by two mechanisms. First, there may be actual differences in how women and men signal leadership qualities. Second, there may be differences in how women and men are perceived by others when doing so. We tested these two explanations within one setting for the key leadership quality of exerting influence on others. We conducted an experiment with 160 women and 160 men who delivered a speech in which they signaled their ability and intent to perform well in a subsequent real-effort task, with the goal of persuading observers to invest money in their future performance. The speeches (audio and body movements) were transposed onto both women and men avatars. A total of 320 different participants then watched a random subset of six speeches each and made incentivized decisions as to which speaker(s)’ task performance to invest in based on their evaluation of the speeches. Neither actual nor perceived speaker gender predicted speakers’ ability to exert influence in terms of attracting investments. In the context of our study, we thus do not find evidence that women and men differ in their ability to exert influence, or that others are biased towards women when evaluating their speeches.