Status Processes and the Institutionalization of Women as Leaders
By Jeffrey W. Lucas. American Sociological Review, 2003
165 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Socially disadvantaged individuals often encounter resistance when they rise to high-status positions. For example, women, according to status characteristics theory, will be disadvantaged relative to men in social interactions, other things being equal. Institutionalizing women as leaders may overcome such disadvantages. Drawing from status characteristics theory and institutional theory, it is predicted that institutionalization of female leadership can reduce the influence gap between women and men by legitimating structures of female leadership. Results of an experiment conducted to test this idea show that, as predicted, male leaders attained higher influence than did female leaders, and leaders appointed on ability attained higher influence than did randomly assigned leaders. Institutionalization, however, reduced the advantage of men such that female leaders appointed on ability when female leadership was institutionalized attained influence as high as male leaders appointed on ability when female leadership was not institutionalized.
Subfields: Gender Studies, Organizational Behavior and Human Resource Management, Sociology and Political Science
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/4705a8af381ec9425dad0871d8591c0a67ba900d
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In Gender Studies
In Organizational Behavior and Human Resource Management
Citations in the corpus
- Women “Take Care,” Men “Take Charge”: Managers' Stereotypic Perceptions of Women and Men Leaders (2009, background): “Furthermore, the established tendency for people to associate a masculine gender with higher power and status (Lucas, 2003; Ridgeway, 2001) suggested that influencing superiors would be seen as a masculine leadership behavior.”