The Psychology Behind Gender Parity in the Working World

Social psychologists study how people form impressions of others, and how these impressions influence our interactions, beliefs, and actions later on. I am especially interested in how this unfolds in work environments. I want to know how people size up their leaders, team members, direct reports, and negotiation partners, and why these perceptions end up being so crucial.

Research shows that we’re not objective perceivers. We have beliefs about people from different social groups—stereotypes—that we bring to bear on our interactions and judgments of those around us. Part of my work is about pinpointing those beliefs and seeing how they play out in the workplace.    

The other piece is thinking about how to navigate situations where you're on the receiving end of these preexisting beliefs. In the context of gender, people tend to assume women are easygoing, quiet, nurturing, careful, and deferential. These Gender-gap beliefs color how people interpret women’s behaviors, but they also set expectations as to how women ‘should’ act. The challenge is that the expectations of what women leaders should be like are often at odds with what we expect of good leaders. We expect leaders to be assertive, outspoken, confident, and willing to embrace risks. Our beliefs about what women and leaders should be like are misguided. But the fact that people hold these gender inequality beliefs and that they are inconsistent presents a conundrum for women in leadership roles.

With my collaborator Ashley Martin at Stanford, I’ve done work that considers why companies would continue to assign products a gender given evidence that it tends to reinforce the stereotypes that people have about women versus men. Our research Hey Siri, I Love You: People Feel More Attached to Gendered Technology shows that products that play a “servile” role are often positioned as having a female gender. What we find is that consumers do assume that products with a female gender have stereotypically female traits and that consumers tend to like the product more —they’re more attached to it—if it is clearly male or female. This work is consistent with a wealth of research showing that, even if they are demonstrably wrong, stereotypes provide a backdrop for people to make sense of and predict how other people — and, in this case, an anthropomorphized product—will behave. It makes them seemingly predictable; it gives the world a sense of order.

Leadership isn’t always a walk in the park. I’ve worked with many leaders, and I’ve worn the leadership hat myself. Honestly, there’s no “wrong” time for a leadership development program like ours. We are all continually evolving. There is always space for improvement. The reality is that no one person possesses all the skills you need to nail leadership. Developing an awareness of your strengths and limitations is a journey that never ends. The same goes for identifying strategies to better play to your strengths as a leader and manage your shortcomings.

If you are anticipating a career transition that comes with more responsibility or an expanded team, it certainly is useful to sign up for a program like ours. Our program is also useful for people who want to accelerate their promotion to a position of leadership—you haven’t been offered a leadership role but you aspire to step into one in the next few years. In fact, I think it can be useful to use a course like this as an opportunity to reflect as you are winding down from a leadership stint. For the last three years, I served as a Vice Dean at the school. I learned so much in that role. But to get the most out of the experience, I really had to take a breather, look back, mull over the highs and lows, rethink how I might approach leadership in the future, and re-evaluate where I’m headed in my career. In short, there's no wrong time to sign up for a leadership program like this one. Certainly, in anticipation of making a leadership jump, and even after you've served in a leadership role, something like this leadership program can be so useful.

Absolutely. We've had male participants in the program in the past. Achieving a workplace that has greater gender equality requires challenging deeply ingrained biases that disadvantage women and other marginalized groups. I think it is unreasonable to expect those at the receiving end of these biases to adjust their behavior to conform to an imperfect system. If you're male, a course like this is a useful launching point for thinking about allyship: what unique challenges might women face, and how do you better support the women you work with? How can you close the gender pay gap? How can you ensure more women are in senior management roles? We need male counterparts to be strong allies and help us tackle an imperfect system that makes it harder for marginalized groups to succeed and take the reins.

Women leaders need the same set of skills as male leaders. They need to rally people around a vision, drive change, make swift yet thoughtful decisions, stay updated on industry trends, and craft strategies that position the organization to succeed in the future. These are essential leadership skills no matter your gender – whether you have leadership aspirations, are already in leadership roles, or are in senior management positions.

Yet, it is still true that female leaders face unique hurdles. For starters, they’re often scrutinized more than their male counterparts.  Because of this, we spend time discussing the way women approach the implementation of their skills and how they instantiate these skills in light of societal expectations of how female leaders “should” behave.

We also dive deep into how women leaders can fast-track their advancement. As discussed, women and people of color are increasingly underrepresented as you climb the corporate ladder. Gender diversity shrinks exponentially the higher you climb. The percentage of people who are female or a person of color decreases with each rung on the ladder. Forty-eight percent of those in entry-level roles are female. By contrast, only 18% of those in the C-Suite are female. Women CEOs only make up 10.4% of Fortune 500 companies. A significant portion of our career development program zeros in on how women can be more strategic about their career advancement—how can they sow the seeds of their greatness in the minds of the people they work with, like senior colleagues and so on.

There's a lot of debate about what leadership even is. We lean into this idea that leadership is a conferred status—when you’re perceived as possessing a set of skills people grant you leadership status. The reality is that leadership exists in the minds of other people. Accordingly, we developed what we call the three P framework – perspective, performance, and perception – as an organizing structure for thinking about how to succeed in leadership. You need a certain mindset and you need to perform, but you also need to be perceived as having the mindset and skillset.

But we also say, "Listen, you don't need to have all of these skills. People just need to think you have these skills." It isn't intended to make people really nervous. It's about helping attendees be more strategic about how they are perceived.

If anything, we feel that the typical woman holds herself back by acting like she needs to have perfected the leadership toolkit before she can even be considered for a leadership role. But how can you perfect some of these skills if you’re not in situations where you can practice them? Trust that you are smart and that you can learn as you go!

In this program, my faculty co-director and strategy expert Trish Gorman really emphasizes thinking about how you can use your network to plant the seed of your greatness. You might not be able to say you're amazing, but your friend can say it. And that’s being strategic about shaping people's perception of you.

Certainly, we all have phenomenal female leaders around us. Columbia has many women leaders. I'm excited to see where Columbia University's new president Nemat "Minouche" Shafik will take us in the future. Columbia Business School has some wonderful women in leadership roles. Katie Conway, our COO and Vice Dean for Staff, is amazing. I learned so much from her when I was on the leadership team.

Why would you want to learn about leading as a woman from an institution that didn't have women in leadership?

I’d also mention some of our stellar alumni like Shazi Visram, CEO and Chief Mom of Happy Family Brands, and Beth Ford, CEO at Land O'Lakes. 

Malia Mason is the faculty co-director of our Women in Leadership: Next Level Success program.