Are female bosses making it tougher for women to rise up the ranks?

In an April article in Forbes magazine, Cami Anderson observed that many women are effective leaders in handling the COVID-19 crisis. Numerous countries with women leaders, such as Germany, New Zealand, Iceland, and Finland, were proactive in dealing with this crisis. However, in nations and in businesses, women are under-represented with this phenomenon especially noticeable at senior leadership levels.

The presence of “queen bees”, women bosses who treat female subordinates badly  because they are seen as potential rivals, is sometimes cited as a reason the glass ceiling remains very much alive some 40 years after it entered the corporate lexicon. 

While several studies have supported the “queen bee” theory — Britain’s first female prime minister, the late Margaret Thatcher, has been described as one — there may yet be another reason women leaders are reluctant to help other women in the workplace.

As  female bosses themselves have to deal with what is still a “boys’ club” at the top of the corporate ladder, promoting or hiring women could actually tarnish their reputation and affect their performance ratings, according to two related studies I conducted with my  colleagues.

That gender parity in the boardroom remains very much a work in progress is borne out by various statistics.

In the Fortune 500 companies, women now accounted for 25.5 per cent of board seats, compared to 15.7 per cent 15 years ago, according to a fortune.com report.

In Singapore, the proportion of women on boards of the top 100 primary-listed companies on the SGX rose to 15.2 per cent as at December last year, from 13.1 per cent in 2017, local media reported. 

With the boardroom still very much a man’s world, our studies suggest that when women leaders help other women, they risk being perceived as incompetent, engaging in nepotism, and trying to improve the status of their own kind at the men’s expense. 

Male bosses do not face such problems. In fact, when they promote women subordinates, they are lauded as progressive corporate leaders and supporters of gender diversity.

The two studies, which were published in 2017,  found that women leaders were more likely to be given lower performance ratings, and even viewed as significantly less competent when they engage in “diversity-valuing behavior”, such as hiring or promoting more women.

But male leaders did not suffer a similar backlash when they engaged in the same exercise.

The first study involved 350 executives, who were rated by their bosses and peers via a confidential online survey. The assessors were asked to rate the executive’s diversity-valuing behaviour, competence and performance. The responses showed a negative association between the bosses’ ratings of the women leaders’ performance and the latter’s diversity-valuing behaviour. So, for displaying the same high level of diversity-valuing behaviour, a woman leader received a performance rating behaviour of 3.7 (out of 5) while her male counterpart scored higher at 4.1.

The second study examined whether a woman leader who advocated hiring a female manager would be negatively stereotyped and receive lower performance evaluations. About 310 adults were given materials describing a hiring manager’s reasons for choosing one of two candidates for a vacant senior vice-president position. They were then asked to evaluate the manager’s decision, and his/her competence and job performance in making the decision.

This study found that the mean performance rating for male managers who hired or promoted women (3.76 out of 5) hardly differed from those male managers who did not (3.75). But female managers who engaged in the same actions were rated significantly lower (3.65) than their female counterparts who did not (3.96).

A similar pattern was seen in the area of competence, where female managers who valued diversity were rated as significantly less competent (3.86) than female managers who did not (4.17).

Why the different consequences?

When women leaders recruit or hire women — the former’s gender becomes instantly salient in the eyes of their (mostly male) bosses. This, in turn, would trigger in the men negative stereotypical beliefs associated with women in work contexts — such as perceived incompetence and ruled by emotions.

Men, on the other hand, are less susceptible to negative stereotyping in the office setting.

Past studies have also shown that women leaders who promote female employees may also be seen as threatening the male-dominated power structure — hence the negative comeback.

The glass ceiling may thus become stronger, rather than weaker, when a woman leader is hired. Female managers may feel that they would be better off career-wise by hiring or promoting fewer women.

One way to weaken the glass ceiling is for organisations to shift their focus from “diversity-valuing”  to “demographic unselfishness” behaviour — by assessing, and rewarding, their management staff based on their inclination to hire and promote individuals who are not of the same gender.

Since men currently hold a clear numerical majority at the highest organisational levels, such approach would naturally correct the gender imbalance throughout the company as the male bosses would then be encouraged to hire and promote more women.

Without changes in corporate practices such as this, powerful women may continue to find themselves in a position of being damned if they do, and damned if they do not leave ladder up behind them. ​