Seeing is Believing: Exposure to Counterstereotypic Women Leaders and its Effect on the Malleability of Automatic Gender Stereotyping

In both studies, the authors found that when women were exposed to female leaders, they were less likely to hold unconscious, stereotypic beliefs about other women.

• Women who were exposed to women in countersterotypic leadership positions in the laboratory setting were more likely to automatically associate women with leadership qualities than the control group. Exposure to women leaders did not simply reduce stereotypic beliefs among study participants, but rather activated more counterstereotypic beliefs, such as positive beliefs about women as leaders.
• In the field study, participants’ implicit beliefs were statistically equivalent when they entered college as first-year students at the coeducational college or the women’s college as measured by Implicit Association Test (IAT) scores, but diverged substantially after a year. In their sophomore year, students at the women’s college showed no implicit gender stereotypes on the IAT, whereas their peers at the coeducational college showed substantially stronger stereotypic beliefs. The difference in IAT scores was found to be statistically significantly different (p=0.002)
• In the field study, the more students at both institutions encountered course instructors who were women, the less gender stereotypes they expressed implicitly. Female students who encountered mostly male faculty showed more gender stereotypes favoring male leaders over female leaders compared to others who encountered more female faculty.
• The participants’ explicit, conscious beliefs showed no significant changes in either the laboratory or field setting after exposure to female leaders.

In short, being exposed to women in counterstereotypic leadership positions can have a positive influence on women’s implicit beliefs about women.

This paper is based on two studies. In the first, a treatment group was exposed to pictures and biographies of famous women in leadership roles in the laboratory, while a control group was exposed to pictures and descriptions of flowers. The treatment group completed a questionnaire assessing the degree to which they identified with those leaders. All participants completed a questionnaire that assessed their automatic and self-reported beliefs about women. A sample of 72 women from New York City participated in this study.

In the second, the researchers tracked one group of female students attending a women’s college and another group attending a comparable coeducational college. Each participant’s beliefs were assessed at two time periods – at the beginning of their first year in college and during their sophomore year. The researchers also attempted to identify specific features of the college environment that might influence changes in automatic gender stereotypic beliefs. Eighty-two female students from two liberal arts colleges located in the same town participated in the study.