By Catherine Tinsley
For decades, female leaders have been balancing the incompatibility of traditional female gender norms with the masculine ideals equated with effective leadership.
Women who wield power and act assertively often experience backlash that can hurt their rise to the top. When working to incorporate the necessary masculine behaviors, such as being assertive, into their leadership styles to achieve their career goals, female leaders often encounter two distinct prejudices: (1) women are perceived as poorer leaders relative to men and (2) women who overtly demonstrate their competence in this masculine domain incur social punishment.
In my recent study with Emily Amantullah, “Punishing Female Negotiators For Asserting Too Much… Or Not Enough: When advocacy moderates backlash,” the findings suggest that by understanding when and why backlash occurs, we can provide guidance for female leaders to help them advance in their careers. Below are three recommended principles that women should consider and incorporate into their leadership styles and actions to mitigate backlash:
Advocate for others
Female leaders should be socially supportive and speak out for others. There is growing evidence that when women wield power and assert themselves on behalf of others, they are able to do so effectively and without incurring social repercussions. Women advocating for themselves are often seen as violating feminine gender norms and this norm-violating behavior is punished (by both men and women alike). However, when women advocate for others, this same assertive behavior is perceived as compatible with expectations based on traditional female gender norms that women are helpful and nurturing. In these contexts, women are able to leverage their authority without negative social consequences. Women leaders can be seen as very effective if the beneficiaries of the female leader’s efforts are her team members.
Recognizing that some may need to advocate for their own interests, in a recent study exploring “us-advocacy” we find that women can advocate effectively for themselves as long as they are not only advocating for themselves. In other words, women who lead others and ask for resources for themselves and their team, simultaneously, do not suffer any of the usual social or financial backlash penalties. It’s possible that a simple change of pronoun can help (saying “we” instead of “I”). As a means to navigate the labyrinth of social constraints created by the backlash effect, women who need to speak up for themselves are actually better off doing so by speaking out for themselves and others.
Share your success
Female leaders can advance by others speaking out for them – conferring upon them the social status needed to endow female leaders with the legitimacy to be assertive. In a soon to be published study, “Ask and ye shall receive? How gender and status moderate negotiation success”, our findings show that gender and status may be highly confounded such that in absence of externally conferred status, women are assumed to have lower status than equally positioned men. This lower ascribed status influences how others treat women, especially in response to her assertive, self-interested, resource-seeking behavior. However, signals of externally conferred (otherwise known as achieved) status moderate the backlash effect against women such that women who are known for their high status (i.e., organizational rank) are treated the same as men.
Strike when resources are plentiful
Female leaders can advance through social opportunities created by abundant resources. Studies show in situations where resources are more plentiful, women are freer to wield power and act assertively, even on their own behalves. During times of abundance, general levels of threat are low and gendered norms for acceptable behavior become looser. This emancipates all leaders to engage in a wider range of behaviors with impunity, which may be particularly important to female leaders since normative restrictions on behavior are tighter for women than for men.
This may also explain why women have made slightly more progress in breaking into the top executive ranks at larger firms than in smaller firms. However, even among larger firms, only during times of economic downturn was there any evidence of gender effects on firm risk-taking. Thus timing can be critical; when resources are less constrained, gender is less important.
