Rethinking the Gender Gap in Leadership

A popular topic among business leaders, DEI scholars, and the blue checks on Twitter (or X?) is the persistent gender disparity in leadership. Though women have made great strides since entering the workplace in droves in the second half of the 20^th century, they remain under-represented in leadership roles, most evidently in elite leadership roles (e.g., CEOs), within male-dominated occupations, and in U.S. politics. [1] [2]

A number of explanations for this phenomenon have been advanced. Some argue that women face discrimination in their pursuit of leadership because they are unjustly viewed as less effective leaders than men. It’s true that widely held beliefs about the typical traits of leaders are often masculine.[3] At the same time, we seem to recognize that great leaders are approachable and consider the needs of their followers.[4] These are decidedly feminine characteristics. And the most recent meta-analysis on this topic shows that women are actually believed to be better leaders than men.[5]

Other research suggests that women’s ascension in organizations is hindered by career breaks related to childrearing and a disproportionate amount of domestic labor[6], which would suggest that some of the gender gap in leadership attainment is due to career- and family-related choices that arise from personal preferences.

These preferences and the choices they motivate have been the subject of some my own research. I recently published a meta-analysis showing that women aspire less to leadership than men.[7] In another published study, I found that college-aged women aspire less to positions of elite leadership than their male counterparts, and express less willingness to accept a promotion that would mean they’d sacrifice a position they currently enjoy. These women also emphasized values like "family" and "good health" to a greater degree than the men, whereas the men emphasized the importance of a high salary more than the women.[8]

However, I noticed something interesting while I was doing this research. When asked to rank a variety of work and life goals in order of their personal importance, my male and female participants were remarkably similar. The average participant, regardless of gender, cared more about having a good family life, good health, and enjoyable work than they did about having status and power at work. This makes sense, I suppose. After all, there’s a saying that goes something like, "When you’re on your deathbed, you’ll never say, 'I wish I spent more time at work'."

I then pored over numerous other published studies on the topic of work and life goals, preferences, and values. I saw what I had found in my own research over and over again: While boys/men and girls/women do differ in the personal importance they ascribe to various work and life goals, for both male and female participants the personal importance they ascribed to happy families and work satisfaction nearly always trumped the importance of attaining status and power.[9] [10] [11] [12]

All of this had me wondering how much of men’s higher leadership aspirations stem from their true preferences, and how much are a result of what they think they should prefer. We currently live in a social climate in which girls’ and women’s career preferences are virtually all applauded. She wants to be President? “You go, girl!” She wants to be a stay-at-home parent? “There’s no more difficult or rewarding job in the world.” Indeed, we’ve made great strides in terms of encouraging girls and women be whatever it is they want to be.

What do you suppose happens when a boy or man says he wants to be a nurse? How many people tell him to set his sights higher? “Why not a doctor or a surgeon?”, he might hear. How many men would prefer to be stay-at-home parents and let their spouses lean in at work? Among these, how many of them would feel safe admitting it to others? And how many of them would seriously pursue this aspiration in their own lives?

Finally, how do people respond to a man who was just offered a big promotion at work that would mean a lot more responsibility and a salary increase, but who says that he’s just not that interested? Does he receive more or less confusion, contempt, and peer pressure than a woman who’s in the exact same boat?

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All of these questions intrigue me because I have a suspicion that if we are to see an increased number of elite female leaders, this will have to be preceded by a lot more men — many of whom will have the requisite education to have high-status careers — deciding to step back, or away entirely, from their careers in order to spot their female partners as they climb. I further suspect that this need not be an incredibly tall order. In fact, I think there are a lot of men who would happily do this if they didn’t feel they would be judged negatively by their romantic partners, friends, family, and strangers.

Perhaps we all need to think more critically about the subtle and explicit pressure we place on boys and men to live up to an outdated stereotype of the male breadwinner. Young women who aspire to elite leadership might think carefully about what they really want and need in a future romantic partner to help them achieve their aspirations. Troublingly, recent experimental research conducted on Tinder suggested that women still care a lot about having a partner with high earning potential. On the bright side, the men in the same study weren’t intimidated by women with high earning potential.[13]

We’ve done so much work to move women into careers traditionally dominated by men. I applaud this work and all that it has accomplished. But if we want this trajectory to continue, it’s long past time that we invest more energy into removing the constraints that boys and men face in terms of their career choices. A good place to start is with how we talk about the caregiving aptitudes of boys and men, our resistance of gender stereotypes in our own romantic partnerships, and the role modeling we provide at home, work, and in classrooms.