Do Employees Prefer Male Or Female Bosses?

You know, you're not a man," Akio Morita, Sony's cofounder and former chairman of the board said to one of the firm's senior female executives over dinner one night. "Nope, that's absolutely true," the woman, a single mother divorced with three children, replied. But you're not a woman." "Uh, OK. What am I?" "You're in a third category." Right, she's a woman boss. It was some two decades ago that Barbara Annis, now of Barbara Annis & Associates, a firm that advises blue-chip companies on gender diversity and inclusiveness, had that conversation with the late "god of Sony ( SNE - news - people )." But not a lot has changed in terms of how we view female leaders. Are men actually better bosses? Are women doing something wrong? It's not just anecdotal that male bosses are perceived to be better at their jobs. "It's a general cultural phenomenon, the preference for men leaders and bosses," says Alice Eagly, Ph.D., a social psychology professor at Northwestern University. In the most recent Gallup data, from 2006, 34% of men preferred a male boss while 10% preferred a female boss, while 40% of women preferred a male boss and 26% preferred a female boss. (The remaining respondents of both genders had no preference.) One explanation for the across-the-board preference of male leaders may be deeply instilled gender stereotypes held by both men and women. "The cultural model of a leader is masculine," says Eagly. "Leaders are thought to be people who are dominant and competitive and take charge and are confident. Those kinds of qualities are ascribed to men far more than women. Women are ascribed to be nice. We are, above all, nice." As a result, many executive women have adopted male personality traits. This is what Annis, who is chair of the Women's Leadership Board at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, did in the early 1980s as she worked her way up the corporate ladder at Sony. "They thought I wasn't assertive, and so they sent me for assertiveness training for women, called 'guerrilla war tactics for women in business,'" she says, recalling how they taught to lower and project her voice. Twenty years later, through her firm's work, she still notices women distancing themselves from their female identities, just trying to be one of the guys. But when women take on male characteristics, they are viewed more negatively than a man doing the exact same thing, says Robin Ely, Ph.D., a professor of organizational behavior at Harvard Business School. To complicate things further, female boss-female subordinate relationships can be particularly prickly, especially in firms with few women at the top. In the male-dominated professional service firms Ely has studied female executives universally condemned the most senior women. "They described them as poor role models; they felt no ability to identify with them on the basis of shared gender," she says. None of this, though, means women are actually worse bosses than men. And they just might be better. The January 2009 issue of the Harvard Business Review looked at how female and male leaders were rated in 360-degree feedback reviews on leadership competencies as defined by Insead's Global Leadership Center in Fontainebleau Cedex, France. The eight competencies were envisioning, energizing, designing and aligning, rewarding and feedback, team building, outside orientation, tenacity and emotional intelligence. It's well worth noting that the leadership competencies measured in the study were not traditional masculine-associated traits such as competitiveness, self-confidence and dominance. The bottom line is women don't necessarily make worse bosses. They are just perceived as such. http://www.forbes.com/2010/05/27/women-boss-success-forbes-woman-leadershipwork_2.html