Which female makes it to the top? Exploring the gender differences in the role of nuanced personality and psychosocial traits in elite sports career progression

Abstract

Despite a solid foundation of women's career progression research, the role of personality and psychosocial characteristics in explaining objective career success is not yet fully understood. Today, two alternative perspectives on the role of gender and personality in career advancement prevail. On the one hand, the gender-invariant role demands perspective suggests that women in top level positions show agentic personality traits, whereas advocates of the changing roles perspective argue in the opposite direction, emphasizing the benefits of distinct communal traits. Analyzing career promotion data from 299 German athletes from different sports (53 % female), we investigated whether the role of personality, psychosocial, and cognitive characteristics in professional sporting career ascendency differ between genders in an environment where between-sex competition is absent. Our results indicate that, even in a situation without potential gender discrimination, the gender-invariant role demands perspective prevails as female athletes who made it to the highest rank do not display attributes different from their male peers, despite demonstrating higher core self-evaluation (CSES) scores, i.e., rather agentic traits like internal locus of control, self-esteem, and self-efficacy. Using survival analysis, we also find support for the gender-invariant role demands perspective in explaining the relative speed of male and female athletes' promotions to top positions. Additional analyses on team sports further assert the robustness of the results. We discuss the implications of our findings.