{"id":14132,"date":"2022-03-07T08:54:55","date_gmt":"2022-03-07T14:54:55","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/theamericangenius.com\/housing\/?p=14132"},"modified":"2022-03-07T11:59:13","modified_gmt":"2022-03-07T17:59:13","slug":"the-real-reason-women-are-overlooked-leadership-is-seen-as-masculine","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/theamericangenius.com\/housing\/editorials\/the-real-reason-women-are-overlooked-leadership-is-seen-as-masculine\/","title":{"rendered":"Leadership is seen as masculine, it’s the reason women are overlooked"},"content":{"rendered":"

Researcher Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic recently rejected<\/a> the popular advice of \u201cleaning in\u201d for women* looking to scale the professional ladder. It\u2019s not that women are unconsciously holding themselves back from leadership opportunities, as Sheryl Sandburg so famously theorized in her TED talk<\/a> and subsequent book.<\/p>\n

But, this advice only works for women aren\u2019t actively pursuing higher roles and greater responsibilities.<\/p>\n

The reality is more that even when women are advocating for themselves, they are less likely to be seen as having the qualities of a leader. This widespread gender bias isn\u2019t news: Pantene and some partners even released a feel-good commercial<\/a> that capitalized on calling out how assertive women are \u201cbossy\u201d and borderline competent men are seen as \u201cthe boss.\u201d<\/p>\n

As Chamorro-Premuzic explains, the fact that our culture has so closely adhered to the belief that these characteristics are \u201cmasculine\u201d is more likely what holds high-performing women back. Even if they are better <\/em>than their competition, even other women will often not evaluate them fairly because of how they have internalized our culture\u2019s apparent blindness to women\u2019s ability to be \u201cthe boss.\u201d<\/p>\n

But then, even some masculine-identifying or preforming people who are inferior in their technical skills could be afforded afforded many professional benefits because of the implicit bias we carry into business spaces that favors \u201cmasculine\u201d traits. For example, \u201cmale-performing\u201d assertive people may get credit for a quieter colleague\u2019s work.<\/p>\n

Where Chamorro-Premuzic’s editorial gets really interesting is when they reject the idea that women and other minorities need to over-compensate for their marginalization and try to join the good ol\u2019 boys club.<\/p>\n

He explains, \u201cIf our solution is to train women to emulate the behavior of men\u2026 we may end up increasing the representation of women in leadership without increasing the quality of our leaders. In this scenario, women will have to out-male males in order to advance in an inherently flawed system<\/strong> where bad guys (and gals) win. Unless our goal is to make it easier for incompetent women to succeed \u2013 much as it is for men \u2013 there is little to gain from this approach.\u201d<\/p>\n

As I\u2019ve said before: Being a leader is a gender-neutral act<\/a>, (spoiler: so are all actions!); the sooner that we can accept that coding behavior as \u201cmasculine\u201d or \u201cfeminine\u201d only serves to obscure people\u2019s actual contributions, the better.<\/p>\n

Removing these archaic labels allows the real <\/em>competencies of professionals to be evaluated \u2014 for their benefit, and their organization\u2019s benefit.<\/p>\n

For now, organizations that make conscious efforts to level the playing field (like the National Association of Realtors’ restructure leading to half of their leadership team being women) are the primary answer as our culture shifts to a more aware environment.<\/p>\n

*Though the referenced article and study perpetuate a binary gender structure, for the purposes of our discussion in this article, I expand its \u201cdiversity\u201d to include femme-identified individuals, nonbinary and trans workers, and anybody else that does not benefit from traditional notions of power that place cisgendered men at the top of the social totem pole<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

(EDITORIAL) We can tell women to “lean in,” or we can address what researchers point to as the real challenge – leadership is still seen as a masculine trait.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":337707,"featured_media":13364,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"wds_primary_category":0,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[254],"tags":[516,1234],"class_list":["post-14132","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-editorials","tag-leadership","tag-real-estate-news"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/theamericangenius.com\/housing\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/2\/2018\/09\/networking-handshake.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/theamericangenius.com\/housing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14132","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/theamericangenius.com\/housing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/theamericangenius.com\/housing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theamericangenius.com\/housing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/337707"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theamericangenius.com\/housing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14132"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/theamericangenius.com\/housing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14132\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18472,"href":"https:\/\/theamericangenius.com\/housing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14132\/revisions\/18472"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theamericangenius.com\/housing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/13364"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/theamericangenius.com\/housing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14132"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theamericangenius.com\/housing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14132"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theamericangenius.com\/housing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14132"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}