Why Do Gender Gaps in Leadership Persist?

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Kirk Kardashian (host): Hey, this is Kirk Kardashian, and you're listening to Tuck Knowledge in Practice. In case you didn't recognize that clip. It was from an episode of the TV show The Office, where female office workers Pam, Angela, and Phyllis are all expected to organize the office holiday party. While the stereotype that women should plan work parties is funny in the context of a sitcom, it actually happens in the real world. And as Sonya Mishra explains on the show today, when women decline to do these sorts of non-promotable tasks, they incur a likeability penalty, and this can hurt their chances to get raises and promotions. Sonya Mishra specializes in studying how diversity operates within various forms of hierarchy to shape social perceptions and ultimately, the workplace outcomes of underrepresented individuals. In this episode, we talk about two research papers that examine how gender stereotypes affect women's paths to leadership. Sonya is an assistant professor of management at Tuck. Her research has been published in outlets such as Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes and the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology. Drawing on her expertise in organizational diversity, Sonya is responsible for designing and teaching the MBA elective. Leading diverse organizations. In addition to teaching and research, Sonya consults with global organizations that are committed to addressing issues of diversity, equity, and inclusion. Prior to obtaining her PhD from University of California's Haas School of Business, Sonya studied finance at Georgetown University and worked in investment banking. Sonya Mishra. Welcome to Knowledge in Practice. Thank you for being here.

Sonya Mishra: Yeah, thank you for having me.

Kirk Kardashian (host): No, it's an honor. I think we we last spoke on the podcast, uh, maybe last year.

Sonya Mishra: Yeah.

Kirk Kardashian (host): Now you have two new papers that have come out this year. Um, and they both delve into the interplay in society and in organizations between gender stereotypes and career paths, hierarchies and leadership. Uh, your most recent paper on this was just published in Trends in Cognitive Sciences and is titled Psychological Drivers of Gender Disparities in Leadership Paths. Uh, this paper is a review of the literature in this area and offers suggestions on how the malleability of our mindset can moderate the gender dynamics that lead to inequalities. Um, this review paper refers to another paper of yours that we're going to talk about today, which is called What is Mine cannot be Yours. How zero sum perceptions of power and status shape perceptions of ingroup harm from women's hierarchical advancement. That paper was published in April in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, and it reveals how women's gains in power versus status elicit resistance for men. So let's begin by discussing the paper on psychological drivers of gender disparities in leadership paths. Then we'll weave in the paper on power and status. And then we can conclude with some potential solutions to the harmful effects of gender stereotypes.

Sonya Mishra: Yeah. Sounds great.

Kirk Kardashian (host): Okay. Well, let's talk about the new paper first. Tell us about it.

Sonya Mishra: So in this paper, it actually takes a lot of thoughts that have been floating around in my mind for years and puts them out into this, into the paper. And that's basically what the essence of a review paper is. It's think of all this research that you've been living in for the last several years, and create an argument and put it in print. And one thing that I've been thinking about for years was, you know, why are there fewer women than men in leadership? And I started studying hierarchies, and I realized that it is the very essence of how you climb the hierarchy that is gendered as well. So, I mean, a lot of the work broadly has looked at stereotypes. So there's work on how women are stereotyped as more communal than men. So people see them as helpful, other oriented, caring about other people and so forth. And they see men as being agentic, so being assertive and driven and self-sufficient and so forth. So there's these separate stereotypes that people have for men and women. And a lot of the work has looked at how the way we stereotype leaders is looking at these agentic stereotypes. So we think of a leader. We think of someone who's assertive and outspoken. We think of a man. We also think of someone who's assertive and outspoken. So there's nice there's this nice congruence between what we expect the leader to be and what we expect a man to be.

Sonya Mishra: And then obviously, what we expect a woman to be is at odds with what we expect as a society, a leader to be. So that's what the research has historically looked at, and that's what they've really used to explain, partly why there's fewer women than men in leadership positions. But what this review highlights, and what some of the other work I've been doing, also highlights, is that the very components of these hierarchies are gendered. So, for example, one of the ways in which you can climb a hierarchy is by engaging in dominance strategies. So dominant strategies are things that we see President Trump doing right now. So he's implementing these tariffs. He's doing these things to kind of punish other uh entities and coerce them. And he uses intimidation tactics. And this has all been well documented by political scientists, all these different strategies that he uses, and it is called it falls into this umbrella of dominance strategies. Now, the other type of strategies we can use to move up the hierarchy, they're called prestige strategies. So prestige is when you show people how useful you can be, how helpful you can be, all the elements that you can bring to the table and your knowledge and your skill set.

Sonya Mishra: And because you're so helpful to the group, they give you status and you can climb the hierarchy through these prestige strategies. And I mean, the dominant strategies are pretty much at odds with what we expect women to be. So if women engage in strategies like using forcefulness, using intimidation, using coercion, then they get hit with these likeability penalties. And people think, well, she's bossy, she's demanding. She, uh, just all sorts of labels that I'm sure you can think of, too. And that leaves women with the more stereotype congruent strategy, which is prestige. So basically they are left with the strategy where they have to showcase their valuable knowledge, showcase their skill set, and help everybody around them make sure that everybody knows their value to the group, and that's their main way that they can move up the hierarchy without incurring these likeability penalties. So that's just one example of how there's many ways we can move up the hierarchy. Men have all of these different strategies at their disposal, but women, because they get likeability penalties for doing things that are masculine, they have a narrower pathway up the hierarchy. So they have to walk this kind of razor's edge where they can't really step out of line. And they have this. They don't have many strategies at their disposal to move up these hierarchies without incurring backlash.

Kirk Kardashian (host): Mhm. Wow. That's super interesting. Um, it makes me question sort of how women learn this, uh, these stereotypes and kind of learn what the boundaries are, have. Do they take cues from the generation before them? Do they look at other women in the workplace that have maybe stepped out of line, so to speak, and then kind of, uh, you know, tailor their behavior in the other direction?

Sonya Mishra: Yeah. I mean, it's socialized from such an early age, even people's parents will say, you know, girls follow the rules and women get rewarded. Little girls get rewarded for following the rules, and they get penalized much harder than young boys for breaking the rules. So it's this type of socialization starts at a really early age. But then someone like me, I was really optimistic when I was in college, and I was hoping that gender stereotypes weren't going to be a thing in the working world. And then, like many other women, I learned the hard way where I was being assertive and agentic in the workplace. And then I was hit with these likeability penalties. So a lot of women will learn by doing, but then a lot of these behaviors get socialized in women from a really early age as well.

Kirk Kardashian (host): Mhm. Wow. So what is an example of a likeability penalty.

Sonya Mishra: Yeah I mean so it's something like let's let me give you an example. There is research on how women are expected to help with these kind of thankless non promotable tasks at work. More so than men. So things like organizing research seminars, organizing the lunches for the team, organizing the office holiday party, these are all called non promotable tasks. And this is a form of thankless work. It doesn't get you promoted and so forth. But the issue is that when women decline doing these tasks, they get called, not a team player. So that's an example of a likeability penalty, where these social penalties are imposed on women, where people will say, oh, you know, you're rough around the edges or you come on a little too strong or you're not a team player. And oftentimes these types of comments end up in women's performance evaluations. So they're not just things that you will hear in passing in the hallways of your office. They really can determine your pay and promotion possibilities. So these carry a lot of consequence. And by contrast research finds that men did. People don't expect them to be super likable and warm. So when they are at work and they're not being likable and warm, people aren't upset about it. So we can think of tons of men in our society like Elon Musk, for example, who is not likable and warm, but he's still considered a rock star in his field. So for men to be considered these rock stars, they don't need to be likable. But for women, they kind of have to manage both.

Kirk Kardashian (host): Hmm. Wow. Yeah. When you mentioned, um, you know, women being asked to do, I guess, the, the less desirable stuff around the office, I just I can't help but think about that show. The office. Yeah.

Sonya Mishra: Yeah. Oh, my God, when I watch The Office. Well, I watch it and I'm like, this show is hilarious. It's an A plus written show, but at the same time, it captures so many of the things that I study in my research where, yes, the people in charge of planning the office holiday party were Pam and Angela and Phyllis. And if one of them couldn't do it, it landed on the other woman's shoulders. But there's never a time in the office where Jim planned the office holiday party. So you even see in our popular media shows where a lot of these top a lot of the research that we study manifests in these shows as well.

Kirk Kardashian (host): Yeah, I think that's really funny. It's interesting too, that that the shows pick up on on that. Or maybe it's just because the research is mirroring what's going on out there.

Sonya Mishra: Yeah. Well, the writers of that show, Mindy Kaling, for example, she's aware of a lot of this research, I imagine. So I mean, if you watch any of her other shows? She captures some of these subtle gender dynamics, so I'm sure she wrote that into the show as a tongue in cheek type of thing.

Kirk Kardashian (host): Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's funny. Um, I mean, at my house, we have kind of have jokes about blue jobs versus pink jobs. Yeah. Um, and, you know, the blue job taking out the trash. Right. Yeah. And but, you know, I would have no problem if that became a pink job, you know?

Sonya Mishra: Um, no. You're like, this is not my domain anymore. You're not going to miss taking out the trash.

Kirk Kardashian (host): But, I mean, at the same time, like, you know, that's a kind of a joke. You know, blue job, pink job. But in the workplace, it's insidious. Yeah. And it's really impactful. Yeah. Right.

Sonya Mishra: Yeah. I mean, when I was in investment banking, I was in a rotation program and in the rotation program, you basically spent six months rotating, rotating through different divisions of the bank. And technically, they were all supposed to be these front office investment banking style jobs. But one of my first rotations at I remember when I got told about the rotation, the, uh, one of the heads at the bank was telling me about it, and he was so excited. He was like, look, we created this rotation just for you. And it's so special. And this is the first time we've had this rotation. And then I started doing it and I was like, wait, this is an administrative job. And I was like, I went through four years of studying finance at Georgetown. I did all these investment banking internships. I went to all these recruiting events, and the first rotation I got put on was literally an administrative job. And I was the only woman analyst in my bank that that year. And I asked the other men I got hired with, I was like, are you all doing this type of work? And they're like, no, we're actually dealing with clients and we're working on live deals. And I'm like, why am I the only one that's stuck doing this administrative work? And it becomes a problem because when you're going up for promotion, people don't know how to evaluate you because you're like, well, you actually haven't done the things that would make you be seen as worthy of promotion because you've been doing this administrative work. But in reality, women are assigned this type of work. They don't care for it. Particularly, they don't love organizing things and keeping track of deadlines, but it gets handed to them.

Kirk Kardashian (host): Yeah, yeah. Wow. And I think I remember you saying that that experience you had was one of the things that led you to go into academia, right?

Sonya Mishra: Yeah. I mean, I feel like I wouldn't be here right now if I didn't spend those first few years out of college in banking, just kind of seeing this. Um, it was kind of like a rude awakening that I had, because in college, I was really optimistic. I thought gender stereotypes were a thing of the past. Now we're in the early 2020 tens. This is the future. And yeah, I feel like when I was in, when I got to banking, I was like, oh, everything that I've seen in the movies is still happening here.

Kirk Kardashian (host): Yeah, yeah. Um, so in your in your newer paper, you talk about the gendered model of leadership pathways. And you just mentioned, you know, one of those pathways is, is um, prestige versus dominance versus dominance. Right. Are there some other pathways that you want to talk about?

Sonya Mishra: Yeah, there's another one which is just the basis of hierarchy itself. So one base is power. So power is defined as possessing control over valuable resources. And that can look like being able to fire people, being able to hire people, deciding who gets bonuses, deciding who gets staffed on high profile projects. Anything that's a valuable resource that you control is a form of power. And then the other base of hierarchy is status. So status is being respected in the eyes of others and being admired and held in high regard. And you walk through the halls of your office and people respect you. And those are the two ways in which people can kind of move up the hierarchy. They can have power or have status. And my other research finds that power is also stereotyped as more masculine. So when people think of someone in power, they think of someone who is assertive, agentic and self-sufficient and so forth. And when they think of someone who has status, they still think of more masculine traits, but to a lesser extent. So status is still more aligned with masculinity, but it's also slightly more aligned with femininity. So if women were to get some wiggle room status is where it is, like society is a little bit more forgiving for women who have high status.

Sonya Mishra: But the issue with that is that status is conferred. So it very much lies in the eyes of the beholder. So power, once it's given to you, it's given to you by an institution. It's smart. It's much harder to strip away. If you make a mistake at your job but you have high power, it's not like you immediately lose your power. It's given to you from this more formal means. If you are just trading on status alone, you make a mistake at work. People lose respect for you and that's it. Then you lose your position in the hierarchy. So my kind of gripe with that is that yeah, women can have status, which gives them a higher position in the social hierarchy. But when we give women status and not power, we're giving women this form of hierarchical ascension that makes it so that it's more fickle. You can lose status more easily. So although women don't get backlash for desiring status or having status in the same way they do for desiring or having power, it's still the more fickle form of it's a more fickle base of hierarchy.

Kirk Kardashian (host): Yeah. So it's less reliable. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Um, so you mentioned backlash. Um, and I think that's, that's one of the, um, resistance mechanisms that you mentioned in the, in your newer paper. Um, and so these, these are things that happen when a woman tries to act in a way that, uh, people would stereotype it, that a woman should not act.

Sonya Mishra: Right. Yeah. Or, I mean, really in a way that is threatening to the existing hierarchy. So I'll give you an example. There is new research that has come out by my friend Angie Marsh, who's at Wisconsin. She finds that when women display competence, they actually don't get that much backlash. But when they display dominance, that's when they get backlash. So there's basically these two types of agency is what she's found or these agentic stereotypes. It's competent agency and dominant agency. So it shows that, you know, when women can, women have some leeway to display their competence, display their skills without getting backlash. But then the problem is that when women get too good at it. So there's a paper that came out just this year which finds that when women are seen as brilliant, then they get backlash. So really, really high incompetence because then it is threatening and it is encroaching on men's territory in the eyes of society. So when women get too good at something, that's when they get backlash. So it's not even just that when women engage in these non-feminine more masculine behaviors, it's when they are engaging in these more masculine behaviors, but they are also starting to threaten the existing order of things. So there's some work on how when women engage in humor or even like if they make humor mistakes, which is if you crack a joke and it's not actually that funny. Women don't get as much backlash for engaging in humor, because when women are funny, it's not as threatening to the gender hierarchy. But when women are brilliant, that becomes more threatening. So it's a combination of kind of violating feminine stereotypes and engaging in these more masculine traits, but also threatening the existing order of things.

Kirk Kardashian (host): Okay, so aside from the backlash, what are some other ways that the gravitational pull of the stereotype kind of, you know, comes into play.

Sonya Mishra: Yeah. So this is actually my paper that came out earlier this year, and this is a solo author paper, and it was actually inspired by a personal story of my mom where growing up, my mom was a dance teacher, and she, uh, we were the dance team. We were her sub dance teachers. And we would compete in these competitions internationally. We had we ended up having about 500 or so students, and we would fly all over the country competing. My mom would give TV interviews, and she did have status in the eyes of our little community in Delaware. So she became this little celebrity. Everybody knew her. Everybody's children went to the dance classes, and nobody really had a problem with that. And men and women both really supported her rise in status. But then at the same time, my mom was working in banking and she was climbing the corporate ladder, and she was moving from vice president to director to managing director. And with each promotion, she was met with more resistance, particularly from the men around her. And when she was moving up her banking hierarchy, she was getting power. So with each promotion she was getting more control over valuable resources. And I remember her telling me about this. She was like, nobody has a problem with me being the successful dance teacher and creating a name for our community, but people have a problem with me moving up my company hierarchy.

Sonya Mishra: And that just really lived in my mind, that story. And that's what actually inspired this recent paper where I was finding that when women gain status, men don't really have a problem with it. They're like, cool, A-plus for you, gold star. You're respected now. But when women gain power, that's when men actually feel like it is causing harm to men. Because power is traditionally a domain where men have had more of it, and power is also seen as more zero sum than status. So zero sum meaning if I get power, people think I'm taking it away from someone. If I get status, I'm not necessarily taking respect away from anybody else. If I decide to respect one person, I don't have to respect another person any less. So it's very much this, um, people can have a lot of status at once, but power, it does entail control of resources. So you can't have two CEOs of a company. You can't have two managing directors or two presidents. So if one person is getting power, it often means that another person is being dethroned in a sense. So what this paper looks at is that when men see women getting power, they're like, well, this is actually harming our group and they become less supportive of it.

Kirk Kardashian (host): Wow. Wow. That's so interesting. Yeah. I didn't realize that you had, like, a personal connection to that sort of dynamic.

Sonya Mishra: Yeah. I mean, most of my papers especially, I mean, I'm working on another solo paper right now. The solo author papers are really just me venting my personal frustrations in the form of science.

Kirk Kardashian (host): Yeah, yeah. Wow. That's really interesting. Um, so, you know, you talk you talked about, um, you know, power versus status, um, and sort of the harmful effects of these gender stereotypes. Um, what are some ways potentially we can kind of move beyond these stereotypes and sort of put them to rest or make them less powerful?

Sonya Mishra: Yeah. I mean, one of the solutions that the research has looked at is this kind of it's a term that's a mouthful. It's called exposure to counter stereotypical exemplars. But all that means is putting people in these positions that we aren't used to seeing necessarily. So there's a really famous study. It's actually a randomized controlled trial that was done by the Indian government. And what they did was that they had hundreds of local communities, and they randomly assigned half of them to get a mandate. And they said, look, your council members are usually almost always men. These half of you, all as communities are getting this mandate where a third of your council members must be women. So these seats are reserved for women. So it's essentially a quota system. And in America we're allergic to quotas. But the Indian government is perfectly fine with doing these randomized controlled trials. And it's a really cool just experiment, because what you see is that in these communities where they got used to seeing women in these councils for years, they the researchers actually tracked the attitudes of the Indian men in the experimental group versus the control group, and they were finding that the men in the experimental group, they had reduced biases against women.

Sonya Mishra: And it lasted years where they were more likely to associate women with careers as opposed to women with homes. And they even I think in certain parts of India, it's common to have young girls get married at pretty early ages and you pull them out of school. But in the experimental group, these men had higher aspirations for their daughters. They wanted to get them married at later ages. They wanted them to be in school for longer periods of time. So it shows how when you are exposed to people that are counter stereotypical. So a woman who is in a position of power, an authority on this council, it rewrites your mental definition of what a powerful person looks like. Because if we're only used to seeing men in positions of power, that becomes a rigid definition in our mental models. Where we think of powerful people, we think of men. But if we see women in positions of power and it just happens for a period of time, it starts to loosen our mental biases.

Kirk Kardashian (host): Yeah, yeah. And I think that probably gets into another one of your solutions. Right. Which is the mindset issue. Right. Having a fixed versus growth mindset.

Sonya Mishra: Yeah. So there's work on how if you have a fixed mindset you see traits as pretty fixed. You can't really change them over time. You are who you are. And you also see this about you have this attitude about other people as well where you're like they are who they are, they're never going to change. This is just who they are. But when you have a growth mindset, you see things as changeable, as more malleable. And the research is finding that when you have these growth mindsets, then you actually your mental definition of leaders is also more malleable. So you're more likely to write a woman into that mental definition and just expand who you might view as a leader.

Kirk Kardashian (host): Okay, okay. I think it would be interesting to hear about how you bring some of these concepts into the classroom and then, um, some thoughts on on how managers can apply some of this in the workplace.

Sonya Mishra: Yeah, I mean, in the classroom, my class is a very data driven class. So I show my students research, we learn about statistics, we learn about how to read regression tables. And I'm doing this in part because I want them to understand that a lot of these problems in organizations can be solved through data. So sometimes companies, when they have diversity issues and they're trying to increase the diversity of their companies, they almost go in a little blind where they don't act. They're not as methodological. And I teach my students I'm like, we need to get the data first because every company has its own unique problems. Look at the data and see what problems the data is revealing. And then the solution becomes kind of obvious. So I'll give you an example. Google for example. They have a pretty good people operations team. I actually used to work on their people analytics team. And one of the things, um, and this was before I got there, but their people analytics team found that women were turning over at about twice the rate as men, and they just had higher attrition rates than men. And the data revealed they kind of dug deeper into the data and it revealed that it was primarily young mothers who were turning over so that they were driving this higher turnover rate. And then when the when the problem presents itself like that in the form of data, the solution does become obvious, because then Google was like, all right, let's increase our maternity leave from 12 weeks to 16 weeks, and it cut women's attrition rates in half. So what I teach my students is I'm like, we don't have to be all woo woo and close our eyes and throw darts and see what sticks we can actually, most of the legwork is actually in diagnosing the problems that a company might be facing and doing it through data, and then creating more targeted solutions based on what the data is showing.

Kirk Kardashian (host): Wow. Wow. That sounds really effective.

Sonya Mishra: I mean, I hope let's see.

Kirk Kardashian (host): Um, so in an organization, um, who typically would be the person, like gathering that kind of data and looking for those trends?

Sonya Mishra: Yeah. It's funny, I was teaching this to my students just last week, and one of my students raised his hand and he said, this seems like a lot of work. Who's going to be doing all this? Who's gathering all this data. And I mean, in a perfect world, some of these larger organizations like Google and Meta, they have people analytics divisions. So at Google their HR team all had PhDs. So there were all people like me that all had been research scientists, and they were now going into the organization and using the data from the organization to diagnose the problems. But with smaller organizations, I mean, I would recommend senior leaders just keeping track of data. So, for example, if you are a senior leader, keep track of who is getting promoted on your team. Keep track of what type of work is being assigned to whom. So I mean, one strategy that my students talk, I talk about in my class is maybe when you're doing performance evaluations for your direct reports, tag the types of tasks you've been assigning them. Are you assigning them business as usual tasks aka office housework and non-promotable work, party planning and so forth? Or are you assigning them high visibility tasks? And at the end of the quarter, can you look at how you are distributing these task assignments across your employees if you are more likely to distribute these business as usual tasks to your female employees. And that's a red flag, and that's something that you might want to monitor going forward as a manager.

Kirk Kardashian (host): Wow. That's great. Well, well, Sonya, this has been really interesting. Um, thank you for your time.

Sonya Mishra: Thank you. Great chatting with you as well.

Kirk Kardashian (host): Yeah. Thanks. I'd like to thank my guest, Sonya Mishra. You have been listening to Knowledge and Practice, a podcast from the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth. Please like and subscribe to the show. And if you enjoyed it, then please write a review as it helps people find the show. This show was recorded by me, Kirk Kardashian. It was produced and sound designed by Tom Whalley. See you next time.