Broad Objective:I seek to test whether automatic negative beliefs about women can be temporarily modified using a technique where participants are shown examples counter-stereotypic women in the leadership and business domains. Specifically, if individuals are immersed in situations that provide frequent exposure to admirable female role models in leadership positions, their unconscious and automatic intergroup beliefs may be altered in important ways.Throughout history, women have been portrayed in stereotypical ways that often have deleterious characteristics. Counter-stereotypical exemplars may increase ones awareness that people around us do not necessarily fit into all-encompassingcategories.
Specific Aim: I propose the …show more content…
An inherent premise of stereotyping is the assumption that all members of a certain group (out-groups) share the same traits and characteristics (Judd, Ryan, & Parke, 1991). There are several stereotypes identified by research pertaining to men and women: For e.g. women are seen as more communal, whereas men as more agentic (Rudman & Glick, 2001), women more fitting as teachers, nurses whereas men as engineers and accountants (White & White, 2006). Within leadership roles in political and business domains as well, gender stereotypes continue to disadvantage women, as evident from several research paradigms. The old rap; women “take care,” men “take charge”—still persists and this is particularly detrimental in the area of leadership. For example, in Schein’s think manager – think male paradigm participants rated leaders, women, and men on several traits such as intuitive, dominant, curious, competent, emotionally stable (Schein, 1973; Schein, Mueller, Lituchy, & Liu, 1996). Across 40 studies, stereotypical leadership characteristics correlated more strongly with masculine traitscompared to feminine traits, according to a meta-analysis published in 2011 (Koenig et al., 2011).Research from the agency-communion paradigm (Powell, Butterfield& Parent, 2002) generated similar findings, with good leader stereotypes being perceived as having more agentic (masculine) than communal (feminine) characteristics. Drawing from the role congruity model (Eagly&Karau, 2002), this mismatch between leader stereotypes and feminine stereotypes poses a potential threat for women who aspire to become leaders because feminine traits are considered incompatible with leadership roles. This potentially may lead to female leaders being evaluated negatively (Heilman, Block, & Martell, 1995), as in their role as a leaderthey are not acting according to their “appropriate” social role. Although there