Gender differences in leader emergence persist even for dominant women: An updated confirmation of role congruity theory

Role congruity theory predicts that women will be less likely than men to emerge as leaders when expectations for the leader role are incongruent with gender stereotypes. A 2 × 2 × 3 design that crossed the sex of the dominant partner, mixed- and same-sex dyads, and masculine, feminine, and neutral tasks involved 120 dyads of unacquainted college students in which one partner scored higher in dominance. In same-sex partnerships, the dominant member consistently emerged as leader. In mixed-sex dyads, the gender typing of the task did not influence dominant male ascendance but it did affect women’s. When the task was masculine-typed or neutral, less dominant men were more likely to emerge as the leader of the dyad, frequently being appointed by the dominant woman herself. Thus, even when women possess the agentic quality of dominance consistent with the leader role, the incongruence betweenmasculinized task demands and gender stereotypes mitigate against women’s leadership emergence. Looking back into the 20th century, 17 states worldwide elected a women president (beginning with Argentina in 1974), women served as prime minister in 22 states (since the first took office in Sri Lanka in 1960), and only 11 % of the world’s parliaments in 1999 included women (United Nations, 2000). Why so few? One piece of this answer may reside in basic assumptions about themale-appropriateness of the role of leader itself. Even when women possess the agentic qualities typically associatedwith leadership, such as dominance, men are more likely than women to emerge as the acknowledged leaders of groups (Eagly &Karau, 1991)