New Insights on the Obstacles, Opportunities, and Outcomes on Women’s Path to Leadership

Abstract

We adopt a multi-method approach to examine women’s path to leadership from before their careers have even begun, to their leadership at the CEO level. Across four talks employing field studies, lab experiments, and natural language processing, we study how a follow-your-passions ideology causes women to opt out of male-dominated careers, how women’s desires for power or status intersect to impact their likelihood of incurring backlash, how female managers prefer leading smaller teams due to fear of backlash when leading larger teams, and how hiring a female CEO changes firms’ official use of language around gender and agency such that the semantic meaning of the two concepts becomes more similar. The papers in this symposium broaden our understanding of how gender stereotypes present obstacles in women’s career paths, while also identifying potential solutions to backlash triggered as a means of enforcing traditional gender roles. Does the Follow-Your-Passions Ideology Cause Occupational Self-Segregation? Presenter: Sapna Cheryan; U. of Washington Escaping Backlash? The Mitigating Effect of Desiring Status on Backlash Against Ambitious Women Presenter: Sonya Mishra; UC Berkeley Gender & Group Size: Women Prefer Managing Smaller Teams Due to Impression Management Concerns Presenter: Nicole Abi-Esber; Stanford GSB Hiring women into leadership positions affects the gendering of language Presenter: Matthew Asher Lawson; Fuqua School of Business, Duke U.