Gender and Leadership: Study 2

Women are underrepresented in positions of power – a pattern partly explained by pervasive stereotypes about who should be leaders. How do the beliefs underlying gender disparities in leadership develop? This study follows up from Study 1, where we found some evidence that gender stereotypes influence children’s (3.5-6.9 years; N = 185) decisions about who should be leaders or team-players. Children were exposed to the same activity (building a sandcastle) that was described in terms of needing someone to be in charge (Lead condition) or in terms of needing someone to work together (Team condition). We found that girls who were asked to select someone to lead were less likely to choose a female target than were girls asked to choose someone to work on a team. Yet, children evaluated male and female targets as equally good at the stated task (being in charge or working on the team), and there were no gender differences in children’s interest in leadership or in their beliefs about their own leadership or team-player potential. Finally, we did not find that children exhibited any evidence of “backlash” (e.g., disliking those who exhibit gender atypical properties; in this case a female target who wants to lead or a male target who wants to work on a team), such that children were equally likely to want to associate with a target female regardless of whether she chose to be a leader or a team-player (and the same for a target male). These findings suggest that gender disparities in advancement may begin with the acquisition of gender stereotypes about who should lead; however, they left open several questions, which the current study aims to investigate and which are described in greater detail below. First, do children have a “male = leader” stereotype or do they have a “female = team-player” stereotype, and how might these (in similar or different ways) affect their beliefs about who should take on a given role and how good they would be at it? Second, do children’s desire to take on a leadership or teamwork role differ from their general desire to engage in an activity when it is not explicitly marked as leadership or teamwork focused? To address the above questions, we added a third condition (Baseline condition) to assess children’s decisions about who should engage in a task, as well as their own desire to engage in a task, when no leadership or teamwork information was given. Third, although children’s social affiliation decisions (i.e., who they wanted to play with) were unaffected by target’s behaving in stereotypical or non-stereotypical ways in Study 1, children might negatively evaluate targets who act in gender atypical ways, in this way more closely approximating typical “backlash” measures in the adult literature (e.g., Okimoto & Brescoll, 2010). To address this question, we modified the measure from Study 1 to be about evaluation (e.g., how much do you like this kid, on a scale of 1-4) instead of affiliation preference (e.g., which kid do you want to play with, the one who was in charge or the one who wasn’t in charge?) Finally, in addition to collecting data from 4- and 5-year-olds (a subset of the original age group, as we found no age effects in Study 1), we will also collect data from 9- and 10-year-olds, to examine the developmental trajectory of these beliefs in early- to mid-childhood. Given that adults hold fairly robust gender stereotypes about leadership potential, we anticipate that older children will show the same patterns that younger children do, possibly to a greater extent.