The Jacinda Effect - Women and Leadership in a time of Crisis
It’s easy to spin a good yarn, isn’t it? To ask why New Zealand, Germany, Denmark and Taiwan have responded so well to Covid-19, and leap to the obvious connection between Jacinda Ardern, Angela Merkel, Mette Frederiksen and Tsai Ing-wen. Yet, some are insisting women really are better in a crisis and are pointing to a more compassionate style of leadership as the cause. Others are finding that claim absurd; a spurious link based on a handful of anecdotes and a shed-load of confirmation bias.
I’m wary of the simplicity of both positions, and even more cautious about the intuition that one is more supportive of gender equality than the other. In the below article, I summarise the more nuanced conclusions I’ve been reading in recent weeks, before introducing a snippet from MoreThanNow’s latest survey data on leadership from organisations in the UK.
Let’s start by challenging the assumption that because the women above share a gender, they also share a leadership style. As Helen Lewis writes in The Atlantic, “the way Merkel governs is unlike Ardern—who, in turn, is more like Canada’s Justin Trudeau than like any other female leader”. She goes on to remind us that these generalisms, even when positive, can do more harm than good:
“We should be wary of the superficially appealing argument that women leaders are better because they are “empathetic.” That’s an essentialist view of gender—men are X, women are Y—and one that has tended, historically, to hold women back. ”
Lewis lends support to an alternative theory put forward by Kathleen Gerson, a sociology professor at NYU, that women are more likely to be elected in a political culture in which there’s relative support and trust in the government. The idea is not that these leaders have performed better in the pandemic, but that a society which is progressive enough to elect them will be more resilient to the crisis. Gerson only suggests this may be a contributing factor to the trend of successful female leaders, but Lewis pushes it further: “After centuries of dogma that men are naturally better suited to leadership, the opposite is not suddenly true. Women leaders are not the cause of better government. They are a symptom of it”.
I'm not convinced this is justified. While I emphatically agree that we should avoid essentialist views of gender, social science also needs to go beyond the principle that ‘everyone is an individual’. We can hold that value dear while acknowledging that our background, experiences, and socialisation can make us more likely to be X or more likely to be Y. It is entirely plausible that this would lead to differences in leadership styles at group level. It’s equally plausible that some are more effective than others.
Professor Zoe Marks, a lecturer in Gender Policy at Harvard Kennedy School, begins to outline this position in The Washington Post. She too warns about the dangers of essentialism, but moves on to how social stereotypes can shape the leaders we become.
“Leaders learn to take into account social expectations. Women in male-dominated fields often incur penalties for assertive, power-seeking behavior because it violates expectations of feminine communality.”
Of course, the forces of social expectation are aimed at men too (often with life-threatening consequences to our mental health). In the same way women can be penalised for challenging gender expectations, male leaders can feel less able to harness the strengths of ‘communality’ and more pressured to display traditionally masculine traits. It’s a point Professor Gerson introduces in a separate interview with The Hill:
“There are so many ways that men are expected to behave when they’re leaders that I think it sometimes makes it difficult for them to step over those boundaries and act in a different way from the norm.”
These are not just theories: both academics are drawing on decades of evidence that male and female leaders are more likely to exhibit certain leadership styles. This does not mean that there aren’t plenty of exceptions; of assertive, autocratic, power-seeking women and compassionate, democratic, communal men. It just means that those counter-stereotypical leaders will be less common, and may also be judged more harshly by others.
So the question remains: are women displaying different leadership styles in this crisis, and are those styles more effective? I don’t think we can go much further with stories about Jacinda, Boris, Donald and Angela, but there are plenty more leaders in our organisations from which to draw a larger sample. In a recent survey, we asked 400 UK employees from multiple organisations to give us their perspective on the leader of their division. Once they had completed their answers, we asked whether that leader was a man or a women. Here are the questions and results:
MoreThanNow, May 2020; answers given on a 7-Point Likert Scale.
So now we have a handful of women who are successfully leading entire countries through a health crisis, and a larger group of women who are perceived to be leading organisations with a style considered less ‘natural’ than their male peers.
Is it more effective? That’s a tricky question to answer with a survey. Even if there was a significant difference in the question about leadership confidence (which there is not), this is a weak measure from a behavioural perspective. What we really want to know is what actually happens to these organisations as a result of these leadership styles, but that would require experimental research. All we can say is that women are perceived to be leading with a different style to men; that this style seems to align to stereotypical norms; and that it does not seem to impact employees feelings about their capability.
Those conclusions still come with some caveats. We haven’t discounted Professor Gerson’s first theory; it’s possible that these results are not driven by the fact that women are leading differently, but that the companies they work for are likely to have more progressive, open and inclusive cultures. It’s also possible that these answers are simply employees projecting characteristics on male and female leaders according to stereotype rather than their actions in the real world. As with all complex behavioural questions, the answer is probably complex too. For the time being, I can’t improve upon Professor Marks’ final position, other than to extend it to a more local, organisational level:
“Make no mistake: Countries that are doing well cannot cite the biology of their leaders. They are excelling because they have good policies, clear communication and information-sharing, and leaders who listen. To the extent that female heads of state are performing better than men against the coronavirus crisis, it’s likely because women are expected to be — and have learned to be — more democratic leaders, more collaborative and more compassionate communicators.”
I don’t want to skip over the human impact of this conclusion, something made particularly salient by the effect of Covid-19: We live in a world where the vast majority of political and organisational leaders are men, a group that are socialised to be more likely to lead with a more technical, transactional style. We also live in a world where women’s leadership potential is held back by bias, expectation and prevailing power structures, and which is more likely to bring people together in a crisis.
But let’s not fall back into that trap of essentialism. The gaps above are hardly cavernous. And within this data, there will be a number of autocratic, assertive women and a number of empathetic, collaborative men. So what would happen if we analysed the data by leadership style rather than gender, and then correlated those answers to people’s experiences during the lockdown? Would we simply find a more effective way of leading that is more commonly found among women?
Beyond the health crisis, we have some answers to these questions. Many studies show that stereotypically “feminine” leadership traits are more effective, while people still prefer the confidence, competitive, decisive traits exhibited by men. It’s a paradox that isn’t helped by the organisations that still quietly fetishisize these masculine characteristics. The one’s that shout about collaboration while ranking their employees against each-other in their performance reviews; the one’s that extol the virtues of ‘purpose’ while using short-term revenue targets as their primary measure of success.
Now is the time to reset our conceptions of leadership: we have an opportunity to make them better and more inclusive.
“I really rebel against the idea this has to be a place full of ego and where you’re constantly focused on scoring hits against each one another. Yes, we need a robust democracy, but you can be strong, and you can be kind.”