What Happens When Women Lead

Decades of psychological research confirm when women are empowered to take on leadership positions, the effects can be metamorphic for everyone.
 

• Female leaders demonstrate more transformational leadership styles.  They are more likely to epitomize what’s good in the organization and inspire people to go along with its mission, compared with men

 

• Women are now seen as equally or more competent as men, finds a 2020 meta-analysis led by Eagly. The researchers looked at three types of traits—communion (i.e., compassion, sensitivity), agency (i.e., ambition, aggression), and competence (i.e., intelligence, creativity)—and whether participants thought each trait was truer of women or men or equally true of both.

 

• Team collaboration is greatly improved by the presence of women in the group, an effect that is primarily explained by women’s benefits to group processes, according to a 2010 study. Groups with more women exhibited greater equality in conversational turn-taking, further enabling the group members to be responsive to one another and to make the best use of the knowledge and skills of members.

 

• Women rank better than or equal to men in seven of eight traits relevant to leadership. Women are also ranked as being more compassionate, outgoing, and creative.    

 

• The mere presence of a female leader relative to a male leader led perceivers to anticipate fairer treatment in that organization and greater projected salary and status. Female leaders cued organizational trust in both male- and female-dominated industries and when they occupied different levels of the organizational hierarchy.

 

• Appointing women to the top tiers of management can even help mitigate deep-rooted stereotypes that are expressed in language. Female representation is not merely an end, but also a means to systematically change insidious gender stereotypes and overcome the trade-off between women being perceived as either competent or likeable

 

Source: apa.org