Envisioning Positions of Leadership: The Expectations of University Students in Virginia and Puerto Rico

Abstract

Eighty‐six university students in Virginia and 46 in Puerto Rico were asked to imagine themselves in a series of powerful roles, describe what they imagined, and rate each role's positivity and possibility. Among the Virginia students, women were more likely than men to anticipate relationship problems with powerful roles and to mention physical appearance. The Virginia women rated images of themselves in powerful roles more negatively than did the Puerto Rico women. Women in the two samples did not differ in their frequency of anticipating relationship problems with powerful roles, but they differed in the correlates of such anticipation. For the women in the Virginia sample only, anticipating relationship problems was associated with low self‐rated possibility of achieving these roles. Whereas young women do envision ambitious leadership possibilities for themselves, they apparently struggle to accommodate these visions to the contradictory prescriptions for powerful women.