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The Public Expects More from Female CEOs

UVA

As we approach the 2020 presidential election, some scholars are still speculating over why Hillary Clinton lost her 2016 bid.  At the University of Virginia, two professors at the undergraduate business school have a theory, based on a study of how consumers think about female CEOs. 

When voters began to question the character of Hillary Clinton during the 2016 race, Nicole Votolato Montgomery was puzzled.

“People were expressing lower trust in the female candidate despite the fact that there was some evidence that the male candidate had made more false statements,” she recalls.

She and Amanda Cowen, another professor at the McIntire School of Commerce, wondered how the public thinks about female leaders – whether they are somehow held to a higher standard.  To test that theory, they asked about a thousand people to read stories based on actual events in the business world.

There was Marissa Mayer’s decision to make Yahoo employees come to the office rather than working at home, Indra Nooyi’s defense of Pepsi peddling soft drinks and snacks in schools and Heather Bresch heading a drug company that raised the price of a life-saving EpiPen by 400%. 

“All we did was change the name of the CEO," Montgomery explains. "It was either Abigail or it was Adam.  We didn’t really highlight the fact that it was a female or male CEO, and it matters.”

Consumers were more likely to reject products or services from troubled companies headed by women, and they wanted female CEOs to take the blame for anything that went wrong.

“The expectation is that female CEOs should apologize and accept full responsibility for every single failure that occurs in the organization, even though there was no indication that she was personally responsible for anything that happened, and that was a little scary to us, because organizations that accept full responsibility are also opening up the door to lawsuits or other sorts of liability.”

Male CEOs, on the other hand, got a pass if they simply said their hearts went out to the victims of a product failure. The key, Montgomery says, is public expectations for women versus men.  

“Women are expected to be more communal, helpful and sensitive to the needs of others, so it raises expectations that we will behave ethically, and when we violate those expectations or are perceived to violate those expectations, people don’t like it.”

Conversely, consumers didn’t expect female CEOs to be especially competent. So what are a woman and her public relations team to do?

“You want to sort of manage how people think of you as a leader -- to think about, ‘How do I convey to people that I am skilled and ambitious. So instead of talking about Marissa Mayer and her ability to be a working mom who can manage her job and a pregnancy, maybe we should be talking about the fact that she was given this role because she’s skilled, and she’s really effective at leading, and she knows the industry really well.”

Montgomery says that was clear from a follow-up study where women in leadership were praised in print for what some might consider male traits.

“These female leaders are skilled, and they are strongly independent, and they are able to work well under pressure.  What if we communicate those positive traits that are normally associated with male stereotypes?  What does that do?”

The study found it undid the tendency of consumers to discriminate against company leaders who happened to be female. 

Read the study

Sandy Hausman is Radio IQ's Charlottesville Bureau Chief