Gender Dynamics in the Suite
Over the last twelve years of conducting 360 interviews in or work with executives, we’ve become increasingly aware of the explicit and tacit references to gender that appear in the feedback for our female clients. We struggled to help women make sense of the information they received, so that they could learn from it and not be victimized by it. We tried to help them sort out what the feedback said about their personal leadership and what it said about their colleagues’ attitudes toward women leaders in general, and to take useful lessons from all of it. As we accumulated these experiences with individual executive women, we became motivated to take a systematic look at the wealth of data we had collected on executive women as a group and to compare that to our data on executive men.
The result has been a research effort, leading to an article that aims to shed light on executives’ attitudes about women’s fitness for corporate leadership and their assumptions about the maleness of the executive role. Our data reveals what many executives think, yet rarely discuss openly, about gender and leadership. It also validates the emotional experience of women executives who feel undermined in ways that are often subtle and hard to point to, yet powerfully real for them. What makes this data especially compelling is that the gender-based thinking about leadership that it uncovers was not prompted by direct questions about gender; instead, corporate executives were asked to speak about the overall leadership behavior of their male and female colleagues and wound up doing so with both explicit and tacit reference to gender. Their comments, sometimes unwittingly, demonstrate the extent to which gender roles and leadership roles are linked in their minds.
Having examined this data, we aim to demonstrate the extent to which this feedback is “gendered” and explore what that says about the intersection of leadership roles and gender roles. We also want to offer guidance about how the women and men of the executive suite can help themselves and each other toward the goal of having the most effective leaders of both sexes thrive at corporate America’s highest levels. And because we obtained this data in our role as executive coaches, we discuss the implications of this material for our practice and for other professionals like ourselves.
Our hope in disclosing and analyzing these private conversations is to make this topic discussable and to invite all parties into a constructive dialogue about what is really going on in the struggle to help more women thrive in senior leadership roles in business. Unless it becomes possible to talk about this problem in a way that doesn’t make anyone feel wrong, or wronged, then progress for women in leadership will continue to elude us.
Selected Research
- Lyons, D., McArthur, C.G., DeVries, D.L. (2004). Gender Matters: The Evaluation of Executive Leadership. Manuscript in progress.
- Lyons, D. (1997). The feminine in the foundations of organizational psychology. Journal of Applied Behavioral Science, 33, 7-26. Article in copyrighted peer-review journal. Reprint available by request: .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)
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