I thought the Hoyt & Murphy reading brought up really good points about women in leadership roles that are often left out when we talk about the ways stereotypes impact leaders. The reading explained that female leaders are double-binded by the stereotype threat, “highly communal women are criticized for being deficient leaders, and highly agentic women experience backlash for not being female enough” (Hoyt & Murphy). Female leadership as a concept is not even about leadership styles or the ability to do the job well, it is about being able to survive the stereotype threat. AND most often: underperformance is caused by stereotype-based expectations. The article also pointed out the important link between self-identification and one’s career. When women encounter gender-based stereotype threat, they begin to disengage and/or disidentify with entire professions. This leads to the clearly lacking number of women in leadership positions in fields across the board. Society has really created this perfect storm of discouraging female leadership across the board, creating this weight that leads to underperformance and dissociation, and blaming the woman in the end. I did really like the researchers’ approaches for reducing negative effects of stereotype threat, especially “making employees, and senior leaders in particular, aware of unconscious biases and unwarranted stereotypes that affect their evaluations of others” (Hoyt & Murphy). This should be applied in workplaces but also schools and universities, and also applied to racial stereotypes as well as gender.
Critical Thinking
How prevalent stereotype threats are to women is definitely worrying, and the reading also made me question … have I unknowingly also been a victim of this thinking? From now on, I will definitely be mindful of how I or others perceive myself, and will make those around don’t get bogged down by these stereotype threats.
I agree, I think that our society definitely needs to change the way that it views and treats women as leaders. Even if someone is very open to having a woman as boss, when they are offered a job with a male boss for less money than if they were to take a job with a woman as a boss, they pick the man. I think that this is a very toxic trait in our culture and it is something that needs to change.
I think the double standard women face in leadership is extremely frustrating. Women either aren’t enough of a leader or if they’re too strong of a leader they’re not feminine enough. For this to change I think we need to somehow break our associations of male = leadership and female=family. I wonder if the Blindspot authors would have any suggestions for overcoming this mindbug.
The reading and the study included were really interesting, there’s a lot of really problematic stereotypes that hurt women in leadership. We all definitely have to be more mindful.