Political leadership positions are dominated by men. Arguably the most visible of a society’s positions of power, these positions may be important symbols of women’s ability to lead. If so, levels of female political representation within a society should shape its stereotypes of women’s suitability for political leadership. This project will test this possibility by conducting a secondary analysis of a dataset that measured the stereotypes of women, men and political leaders in 44 countries covering six continents (Nsample = 23,256). Specifically, we will test whether, as a country’s representation of women in political leadership increases, there is a greater increase in the congruence of that country’s stereotypes of political leaders and women than in the congruence of that country’s stereotypes of political leaders and men. We will also conduct exploratory analyses to identity whether other socio-ecological and cultural variables correlate with cross-national heterogeneity in the content and congruence of these stereotypes. This project will shed light on the way in which macro-level variables can shape micro-level gendered leadership beliefs.

Single parenthood is stigmatized, and the current research clarifies how beliefs about agency and communion correspond to this stigma. Consistent with social role theory, the agency and communion ascribed to parents should reflect their success in meeting the demands of parental roles. Yet, the association of single parents with lower socioeconomic status than married parents likely compromises confidence that single parents can fulfill their parental role obligations and, therefore, lowers their perceived agency and communion. To test this account of beliefs about single parents, four experiments (N = 1003) used multiple methods and samples to examine participants' beliefs about single and married parents and the psychological links between marital status, socioeconomic status, and the ascription of agency and communion. In general, participants ascribed less agency and communion to single than married parents but not to single parents described as high in socioeconomic status (well-educated and financially well-off).

To examine how personal preferences and social norms can influence women's occupancy of organizational leadership roles, this research compared leadership roles that differ in their stakeholder focus on private profit (PP), producing gains for shareholders, or on purpose beyond profit (PBP), producing gains for the community and society. Consistent with the greater representation of women leaders in non-profit than for-profit sectors, the research showed that men preferred and were expected to prefer leader roles focussed on PP and women preferred and were expected to prefer leader roles focussed on PBP. These differing preferences and normative expectations reflected divergent life goals, whereby men favoured agentic goals and women favoured communal goals, with social norms reflecting this gender difference. This research thus showed how the communal and agentic life goals of women and men are linked to their personal role preferences and to normative expectations about leader role occupancy, thus fostering gender segregated leader roles.

Social perception accuracy includes stereotype accuracy, defined as holding correct beliefs about social groups. The present article examines this type of accuracy in relation to gender stereotypes, defined by beliefs about differences between women and men. After locating all studies yielding comparisons between judges' stereotypes and relevant criterion data, we extracted their results and/or conducted original analyses of the raw data reported in the studies. Comparisons of judges' estimates to the criteria yielded high accuracy about the female versus male direction of differences, with 85% of 673 estimates of gender differences aligning with criteria. Consensual sensitivity correlations that assessed judges' collective awareness of the relative size and direction of the criterion differences also favored accuracy with a mean correlation of .77. Analysis of bias in these beliefs revealed both under- and overestimation of the differences, depending on the type of criterion. This review's finding of good evidence for gender stereotype accuracy is consistent with the extensive exposure men and women have to other men and women in daily life.

Miscitation of research findings is a common problem as evidenced by 19

The cultural construal of leadership as masculine impedes women’s attainment of leader roles. This research examined whether adding feminine demands to a leader role relieved the greater stress experienced by women than men in a job interview for a leadership position and considered the processes that mediated women’s less favourable interview outcomes. In a hiring simulation, management students (N = 209; 112 women, 97 men) interviewed for a leader role framed by either stereotypically feminine or masculine role requirements. As shown by the stress biomarker salivary cortisol, the feminine role framing alleviated women’s, but not men’s, physiological stress response during the interview. However, under both masculine and feminine role framing, women, compared with men, reported lesser fit, expected poorer interview performance, appraised greater threat relative to challenge, and evaluated their performance less favourably, as did external raters. An additional vignette study (N = 305; 189 women, 111 men, 5 diverse) found that the feminine role framing increased the leader role’s communal demands but still conveyed strong agentic demands not different from those of the masculine role. In conclusion, although a feminine role framing alleviated women’s physiological stress response, it did not change their less favourable outcomes, as indicated by participants’ self-reports and others’ reports.

Competitive video gaming or esports is a field with the potential for gender-equal competition. However, esports is dominated by cisgender men at both the casual and professional levels. When a field is highly gender-imbalanced, gender minority groups tend to perceive the field as unwelcoming, which reduces interest in the field and further perpetuates unequal participation. One potential pathway to encourage interest and participation is the creation of gender-specific spaces, such as women-only tournaments in esports. To study the group effects of gender on tournament experience, we recruited cisgender women who were novice gamers for in-laboratory, one-on-one esports tournaments under two conditions: in women-only tournaments or mixed-gender tournaments with equally novice cisgender men. Our results show that in matches between men and women, women underperformed against men regardless of whether her opponent had played more often, less often, or equal to her in the past year. In addition, women who played in women-only tournaments gave more accurate estimates of their skill and reported greater task importance than women who played in mixed-gender tournaments. In practice, women-only tournaments may aid recruitment and retention of women in esports as a supplement to gameplay in mixed-gender competitive spaces.

The study addressed the underrepresentation of women in university leadership by focusing on the middle management role of dean. This research set forth two processes that may affect female and male professors' ambition to become a dean: (a) gender bias whereby stakeholders are more likely to recommend men than women for deanships, and (b) self-selection bias whereby men may find deanships more appealing than women do. A multisource, time-lagged study of 278 professors from Germany, Austria, and Switzerland found that both being recommended by stakeholders for a deanship and finding the position appealing related positively to deanship ambitions for female and male professors. In contrast to the gender bias perspective, female and male professors were equally likely to be recommended for deanships, with recommendations reflecting prior administrative leadership experience. Consistent with the self-selection perspective, female professors' perception of more women among deans and their greater endorsement of communal career goals (e.g., serving the community) related to the appeal of the position, which in turn related to their own ambition to become a dean. In contrast, male professors' endorsement of agentic career goals (e.g., receiving recognition) related to the appeal of deanships, which in turn related to their own ambition to become a dean. Overall, these findings suggest that policies to increase the number of women in university deanships should make salient the presence of other women in these roles and also the potential of these roles to fulfill communal career goals.

My earliest insight that I might become a social psychologist emerged in 8th grade when I prepared an oral report to fulfill a class assignment to give a talk on an occupation. I chose social scientist. Although my knowledge of that occupation was limited to what I had learned from a relevant magazine article, the idea that human behavior could be the subject of science was enticing and entirely new to me. The seed was planted.

Whether women and men are psychologically very similar or quite different is a contentious issue in psychological science. This article clarifies this issue by demonstrating that larger and smaller sex/gender differences can reflect differing ways of organizing the same data. For single psychological constructs, larger differences emerge from averaging multiple indicators that differ by sex/gender to produce scales of a construct's overall typicality for women versus men. For example, averaging self-ratings on personality traits more typical of women or men yields much larger sex/gender differences on measures of the femininity and masculinity of personality. Sex/gender differences on such broad-gauge, thematic variables are large relative to differences on their component indicators. This increased effect magnitude for aggregated scales reflects gains in both their reliability and validity as indicators of sex/gender. In addition, in psychological domains such as vocational interests that are composed of many variables, at least some of which differ by sex/gender, the multivariate distance between women and men is typically larger than the differences on the component variables. These analyses encourage recognition of the interdependence of sex/gender similarity and difference in psychological data.

Evidence that women voluntarily expose themselves to some threats more than men do challenges the generalizability of the claim that women exceed men in self-protective responses. Examples include women's higher rates of living organ donation and rescuing Jews during the holocaust. In general, women's efforts to keep other people alive can take precedence over their efforts to protect themselves.

Countries around the world have shared understanding and unconscious biases of what abilities and personality characteristics men and women possess, and how each gender should or should not behave. Gender stereotypes tend to cast men as more competent, strong, and agentic, and women as more communal, warm, and other-oriented compared to members of the opposite sex. Partly because of such gender stereotypes, men and women are perceived and evaluated differently, and they perceive and evaluate themselves differently. Gender stereotypes are consequential: they impact women’s career choices and advancement to the management and top-level positions in the corporate sector, their likelihood of founding new ventures and receiving key financial, human capital, and network resources necessary for scaling up their businesses, their job performance, cognitive resources, and professional fulfillment. Our symposium makes a direct contribution to the 2022 AOM’s theme “Creating a Better World Together”, promoting cross-disciplinary dialogue among scholars from (social) psychology, sociology, entrepreneurship, economics, and organization theory to deepen our understand of ‘how, why, and when’ gender stereotypes are likely to influence male-female differentials in the corporate leadership and entrepreneurship. Our symposium has two goals. We bring together scholars to take stock of the literature, identify puzzles in extant work and future research directions, and build bridges for interdisciplinary research. Our symposium features pioneers from (social) psychology whose work on stereotypes has been path-breaking and is considered foundational in research on attitudes, gender, and diversity, along with strong emerging scholars working at the ‘biases and entrepreneurship’ research nexus. Our second goal is to discuss the effectiveness of existing behavioral interventions to combat gender stereotypes and increase gender leadership diversity in both labor market contexts. The symposium is designed to foster a dialogue between the panelists, discussants, and the audience centered around five discussion topics. It will close with the organizers’ summary synthesizing the scholarly exchange. The symposium is designed for researchers in ENT, OMT, and GDO but could be of interest to a much broader AoM audience interested in research on stereotypes, diversity in leadership and innovation, and organizational performance.

Members of social categories defined by attributes such as sex, race, and age occupy certain types of social roles much more than members of other social categories do. The qualities that define these roles become associated with the category as a whole, thus forming a stereotype. In a vicious cycle, this stereotype then hinders category members' movement into roles with different demands because their stereotype portrays them as well matched to their existing roles but not to these new roles. This vicious cycle has important implications for stereotype change. Given the difficulties of producing enduring change by directly attacking stereotypes in the minds of individuals, a more effective strategy consists of policies and programs that change the distributions of category members in roles, thereby changing stereotypes at their source. If the vicious cycle is not interrupted by such social change, observations of category members' typical social roles continually reinstate existing stereotypes.

An exciting fact is hidden in plain sight in the occupational tables of the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (2020): Women are 49% of jobholders in the occupational category of life, physical, and s...

Three studies demonstrated the expression of gender stereotypes in linguistic behavior. In Study 1, participants composed sentences describing a person by freely choosing from female- or male-dominated occupations, female or male pronouns, and communal or agentic traits. In Study 2a, participants chose traits to describe a person identified by a female- or male-dominated occupation and in Study 2b by a female or male pronoun and noun. In Study 3, participants chose traits for a person identified by both a female- or male-dominated occupation and a female or male pronoun. In general, participants chose more communal and fewer agentic traits for sentences containing a female- (vs. male-) dominated occupation and a female (vs. male) pronoun or noun. However, participants described women and men in the same occupation as similarly agentic or communal, demonstrating the primacy of role over sex information as predicted by social role theory.

This meta-analysis integrated 16 nationally representative U.S. public opinion polls on gender stereotypes (N = 30,093 adults), extending from 1946 to 2018, a span of seven decades that brought considerable change in gender relations, especially in women's roles. In polls inquiring about communion (e.g., affectionate, emotional), agency (e.g., ambitious, courageous), and competence (e.g., intelligent, creative), respondents indicated whether each trait is more true of women or men, or equally true of both. Women's relative advantage in communion increased over time, but men's relative advantage in agency showed no change. Belief in competence equality increased over time, along with belief in female superiority among those who indicated a sex difference in competence. Contemporary gender stereotypes thus convey substantial female advantage in communion and a smaller male advantage in agency but also gender equality in competence along with some female advantage. Interpretation emphasizes the origins of gender stereotypes in the social roles of women and men. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).