Who Makes A Better Leader: A Man Or A Woman?

In 2012, women held just 3.8% of Chief Executive Officer positions in Fortune 500 companies, and 90 out of 535 seats in US Congress.  Much has been written about why women are so severely underrepresented in senior leadership – from poor childcare provisions to institutional bias. One thing researchers can’t agree on is whether there are fewer women leaders because they’re less effective at the job, or because society expects them to be.

One theory goes that society generally associates successful leadership with stereotypically ‘masculine’ traits such as assertiveness and dominance, and so disapproves of female leaders because they violate these gender norms. As a result women experience greater obstacles to reaching the upper echelons. In the 1970s Virginia Schein came up with the phrase ‘think manager-think male’ to explain the automatic association between leadership and masculinity – an association which still exists, in certain circumstances, today (see a previous post  here). But with the recent rise of transformational leadership and its emphasis on traditionally ‘feminine’ traits like empathy, collaboration and emotional intelligence, could the expectations of female leaders be shifting?

Of course, there is no universal rule: different individuals are differently suited to different situations, and context is, as ever, king. To that end, a study published recently in the Journal of Applied Psychology aimed to add a more nuanced insight to the ‘male vs female leaders’ debate. By analyzing the results of 99 different studies that measured leaders’ effectiveness from 1962 to 2011, the researchers were able to unpick the situations in which male or female leaders excelled.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the results suggested that the culture of the organization makes a difference: in traditionally male dominated, masculine organizations like government or the military, male leaders were more effective , while women triumphed in more ‘feminine’ environments like social services and education . Interestingly, under the vague umbrella term ‘business’, female leaders also came out on top.

What’s more, the results also highlighted that it matters who you ask. When leaders rated their own effectiveness, men tended to rate themselves higher than women. But when other people (peers, bosses, subordinates or third-party observers) did the rating, women were seen as significantly more effective than men  – particularly in studies from 1982 and later. This was especially true taking into account the different levels of leadership: at lower, supervisor levels, men rated themselves higher than women, while women were seen by others to be more effective in mid- and upper-level positions.

There are a few possible explanations to this pattern of results:

1. the recent trend towards transformational leadership and its emphasis on empowerment and collaboration – traits traditionally associated with women – means that leadership is increasingly seen as a domain more suited to women.
2. because of the many obstacles that women experience on their way to the top and the assumption that management is better suited to males, people assume that women who have made it to a mid- or high-level management position must be extra special, and so credit them with elevated competence (‘she must be really good to have made it that far’).
3. men have an over-inflated view of their own ability and women really do make better leaders.

Perhaps the most important result from this meta-analysis though was that taking into account self and other ratings, across all types of organizations and all leadership levels, there was no significant difference between male and female leaders. Perhaps in 2014 it’s time we all looked further than gender and concentrated instead on which skills make the best leaders – male or female.

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