Why are we so averse to powerful women?

Why are we so averse to powerful women? Are you shocked by this question?  I was when I first saw it.  It’s a question that Mary Ann Sieghart asks in her book The Authority Gap published last year. 

As evidence for this assertion, Sieghart discusses the treatment that women politicians have received from their peers, the public and the media.  It’s a story we are too familiar with.   There is always a focus on the personal - clothes, hair, age, weight, voices, marital status, children and so on.   As Home Secretary, Teresa May’s leopard print shoes sparked a huge sales boom.  The shoes worked for her in gaining visibility, and attributing personality.  Alas, when May was Prime Minister she received a lot of flak about the cost of leather trousers she had chosen for a photo shoot.  May was also given a hard time for not having children.   In comparison male politicians receive a pint-sized amount of this kind of scrutiny.   

What such women are experiencing is everyday sexism - disciplining and reinforcing how a woman should be.  What everyday sexism does is devour all women’s credibility as leaders.  

It is, though, true that we have a strong ambivalence to women leaders, and indeed to the ambition such women portray in getting into these roles.  On the one hand we want to see more women at the top.  We believe that this will lead to more caring societies. Indeed, recent media attention has lauded how some women leaders have responded during the pandemic keeping case numbers and deaths low.  Jacinda Ardern, the Prime Minister of New Zealand, is a case in point.

On the other hand, we are repeatedly making judgements around whether women have the stuff to lead.  The troubling thing is that we can be making these judgements whether or not we consciously and politically believe that women are the equal to men.   

If you think you are immune to such gender discriminating tendencies – and I did - notice very very carefully the trace of your thoughts as you read the following:  

·      You line manage one man and one woman.  There is a task to do that requires exceptional mathematical ability. Whom do you choose?  

Did you attach the mathematical ability to the man, even if it was for just a nanosecond before you corrected yourself?  I confess I did when I very first read those sentences.  If so, you are not alone.  In her book Invisible Women  Caroline Criado Perez highlights the enormous tendency to think of men when we see gender-neutral terms such as “people” or ”humanity’.  

When it comes to leadership, the danger is that this thinking leads us to this binary trap:

·      Men are powerful, decisive and dominant, ie leaders

·      Women are strident, power-seeking and abrasive, ie not leaders

These stereotypes are not just descriptive.  They have real world effects.  Men are less likely to vote for women.  Men are more likely to be appointed to senior roles than women.  Women who become successful become the objects of trolling on an excessive scale.  And when women are seen to ‘fail’ – as inevitably some do - there is less appetite for the next appointment to be a woman.  When it was clear that Teresa May was facing a leadership contest, Amber Rudd, then Work and Pensions Secretary, was told by a male MP that “we’ve had enough women for now”.  

Funnily enough the same thing is never said after a man is seen to have failed.

In her book, Bias Interrupted: Creating Inclusion for Real and for Good, Joan Williams remarks that for white men to progress they simply need to exhibit authority and ambition.  Everyone else – for example women, minority ethnic and religious groups and disabled people – face jeopardy when showing ambition or asserting authority.  A woman who is ambitious is seen as having ‘sharp elbows’.  An African American man who seeks to be authoritative is seen as ‘intimidating’ or ‘angry’.  When exerting authority, Latina people are seen as ‘feisty’.

How do we rupture these patterns?

There are three things we can all do now.

Taking a leaf from Williams’ book, we can interrupt our own biases.  Biases come in many forms from affinity bias where we have a tendency to like and support someone who is just like us to stereotype biases where we have a fixed set of beliefs about a person based on their gender, religion, age, ethnicity, country of origin and so on.  

Our biases are habitual thought patterns.  They are our default thinking.  Because our brains quickly and automatically come to conclusions about all the information that is coming at us, they can automatically go to stereotypical connections such as the ‘men are good at maths’ assumption above. 

A key challenge arises in how we respond to women who do not accord with the standard template that women are any and all of caring/compassionate/kind/humble/modest/self-effacing and so on.   For example, your female Dean of the Faculty may well be known as the she-devil incarnate.  Yet, how much of our thinking is based on a whole variety of assumptions around what it is to be a woman let alone a woman who leads?  

To interrupt these automated thought patterns, we need to try and slow down our thinking and question our own assumptions and judgements of other people.  This is a time to pause and question whether we are relying on tired old tropes about what a woman should act.

We can also use this knowledge to reflect on our own assumptions - our personal shoulds - about ourselves.  These often make themselves known via our inner critic – our internal voice of fault finding who tells us we should be more kind or we should be modest.  

This thinking is damaging to our well-being and self-esteem.  It creates a brake on any ambition we might have.  It also shapes how we think we have to behave in any situation.  

We can interrupt the negative thinking of our inner critic through the exercise of self-compassion.  Self-compassion teaches us to accept ourselves in all our humanness.  In doing so, we are also more likely to be more compassionate to others.  Kristin Neff’s wonderful website contains more information.

Of course, we don’t only carry stereotypes about others or try to live up to them in our own lives.  Others are carrying stereotypes about us.  This is why it becomes so necessary to interrupt the biases that are held against us by spreading knowledge about its impacts and experiences on all of our lives.

A very easy thing to do is to share the link to Joan Williams’ gender bias learning website.  This has a set of informative resources that outline four key gender biases and strategies for dealing with them.  You might also want to play Gender Bias Bingo and leave your experiences of bias for others to learn from.  

We might have contradictory thoughts about women in positions of power and authority.  That doesn’t mean we have to accept them.  Interrupting the biases that arise from stereotyping – and spreading knowledge about them – are essential routes to freeing ourselves and other women from their limiting impacts.

Christina Hughes is a Professor of Women & Gender Studies and Founder and CEO of Women-Space Leadership Limited.  You can find more about her here.