Raina A. Brands

Just Like a Woman? Effects of Gender-Biased Perceptions of Friendship Network Brokerage on Attributions and Performance

Do women face bias in the social realm in which they are purported to excel? Across two different studies one organizational and one comprising MBA teams, we examined whether the friendship networks around women tend to be systematically misperceived and whether there were effects of these misperceptions on the women themselves and their teammates. Thus, we investigated the possibility hitherto neglected in the network literature that biases in friendship networks are triggered not just by the complexity of social relationships but also by the gender of those being perceived. Study 1 showed that, after controlling for actual network positions, men, relative to women, were perceived to occupy agentic brokerage roles in the friendship network-those roles involving less constraint and higher betweenness and outdegree centrality. Study 2 showed that if a team member misperceived a woman to occupy such roles, the woman was seen as competent but not warm. Furthermore, to the extent that gender stereotypes were endorsed by many individuals in the team, women performed worse on their individual tasks. But teams in which members fell back on well-rehearsed perceptions of gender roles men rather than women misperceived as brokers performed better than teams in which members tended toward misperceiving women occupying agentic brokerage roles. Taken together, these results contribute to unlocking the mechanisms by which social networks affect womens progress in organizations.

The Leader-in-Social-Network Schema: Perceptions of Network Structure Affect Gendered Attributions of Charisma

Charisma is crucially important for a range of leadership outcomes. Charisma is also in the eye of the beholder-an attribute perceived by followers. Traditional leadership theory has tended to assume charismatic attributions flow to men rather than women. We challenge this assumption of an inevitable charismatic bias toward men leaders. We propose that gender-biased attributions about the charismatic leadership of men and women are facilitated by the operation of a leader-in-social-network schema. Attributions of charismatic leadership depend on the match between the gender of the leader and the perceived structure of the network. In three studies encompassing both experimental and survey data, we show that when team advice networks are perceived to be centralized around one or a few individuals, women leaders are seen as less charismatic than men leaders. However, when networks are perceived to be cohesive many connections among individuals, it is men who suffer a charismatic leadership disadvantage relative to women. Perceptions of leadership depend not only on whether the leader is a man or a woman but also on the social network context in which the leader is embedded.

Leaning Out: How Negative Recruitment Experiences Shape Women’s Decisions to Compete for Executive Roles:

This paper proposes that gender differences in responses to recruitment rejections contribute to women’s underrepresentation in top management. We theorize and show that women are less likely than men to consider another job with a prospective employer that has rejected them in the past. Because of women’s status as a negatively stereotyped minority in senior roles, recruitment rejection triggers uncertainty about their general belonging in the executive domain, which in turn leads women to place greater weight than men on fair treatment and negatively affects their perceptions of the fairness of the treatment they receive. This dual process makes women less inclined than men to apply again to a firm that has rejected them. We test our theory with three studies: a field study using longitudinal archival data from an executive search firm, a survey of executives, and an experiment using executive respondents testing the effects of rejection on willingness to apply to a firm for another position. The results have implications for theory and practice regarding gender inequality at the labor market’s upper echelons, highlighting that women’s supply-side decisions to “lean out” of competition for senior roles must be understood in light of their previous experiences with employers’ demand-side practices. Given the sequential nature of executive selection processes, rejection-driven differences in the willingness to compete in a given round would affect the proportion of available women in subsequent selection rounds, contributing to a cumulative gender disadvantage and thus possibly increasing gender inequality over time.