Breaking the male bias on corporate leadership

For years women have been urged to crack the glass ceiling and become great leaders. But what chance do they have when business schools and training courses often add to the problem?

Look up “leadership gurus” and Google helpfully sorts through millions of possible sources to show 24 profile pictures – all white and just one woman. Lists of top international management thinkers and profiles in leadership publications aren’t exactly diverse either. You’ll usually be hard put to find more than a handful of women (mostly white) prominently featured – if they are there at all. The top five leadership case studies used in many management courses and books often include Steve Jobs at Apple, and [Elon] Musk at Tesla, and presumably as a warning, Elizabeth Holmes, the disgraced founder of Theranos. So much for gender equity measures going too far.

There are outstanding women in leadership of all kinds, and many experts in academia, consulting and government. You really wouldn’t know from a trawl through the annals, and that’s a big problem. Women can only make meaningful progress into authority when there are new lessons and different role models that change the story about who has what it takes to be the boss.

Australian director and author Kirstin Ferguson, one of the few women to write a popular leadership book, says the term “leader” has been associated with men for centuries.

“Most of us learn about leaders at school or university, and they were titans of industry, kings or explorers or generals on the battlefield,” she pointed out.

This means that leadership theorists have mostly homed in on ways to emulate the qualities of this cohort. This was reflected in the early MBA programs, and how we thought about the components of leadership: a focus on strategy, business excellence and technical expertise. There have been more efforts to showcase diverse leadership in the media, and as leadership gurus, in recent times. However, the gender problem ­remains endemic.

There’s still a default in management literature and leadership courses to male norms and role models, which then reinforce these traditional qualities.

As the slow realisation of this in-built bias and reinforcement from moribund leadership lessons emerges, “the template laid down by and for very different people and conditions more than half a century ago has started to chafe”, writes journalist Simon Calkin.

It’s companies and their leadership that need to adapt to women and not the other way around, he writes.

Harvard Business School professor Amy Edmondson, specialist in teams and organisational learning, told Calkin: “I don’t think men have a monopoly on obsolete management mindsets, but they probably tend to hold them more often, and by that, I mean the core idea that fear and command and control is the way you get things done.”

Business schools’ curricula can reinforce male leadership styles with the occasional bolted-on women’s leadership module. There’s a tendency to promote the virtues of so-called soft skills in theory, but fewer examples of it in practice or in case studies. Those business and political heroes who are most often lauded are rarely collegiate types. Meanwhile the lucrative coaching and leadership training sector (with some exceptions) tends to fit in with the cultural norms equating masculinity with leadership. This is actually reinforced in the reams of advice particularly targeting women about how to make it into leadership. It tends to promote imitating a male version of confidence, or reinforces a stoic and uncomplaining style that fits in, but does not disrupt power dynamics. These ­biases also influence the kinds of practical tools and training used in organisations, and the diversity ­research and advice from high-profile consultancies such as McKinsey and Boston Consulting Group. I’ve spoken to several CEOs who have conceded privately that consulting advice on improving gender equity has lots of data but often recycles a series of approaches.

Diversity guidance

One former CEO told me he was looking for practical guidance on diversity measures and read a lot of the strategic consulting firms’ reports. He found there were a couple of things that struck him: “One is, if you go back far enough reading McKinsey and Bain and BCG, you’ll find the same stuff. Yep, 10 years ago, the same today. It’s recruitment, onboarding, it’s unconscious bias training, assertiveness training, whatever the training programs are.”

Yet there’s been minimal change in outcomes during that period, he observed, and few clearly measurable processes.

The key attributes outlined as organisational “leadership capabilities” can perpetuate masculine parameters. Leadership coach and former head of DEI (diversity, ­equity and inclusion) at Westpac, Jane Counsel, has often noted the trend when working with people who are being assessed against capability frameworks for development plans and performance assessment. Bias is ingrained in concepts of leadership, and the language used, she explains. When there is talk about business acumen, for example, there may be ­assumptions about required experience and tenure, which can negatively impact women who might have not had as much technical experience in a role, or have taken time out with caring. Counsel mentions some commonly used criteria for executives, which include managing relationships, customer-facing capabilities, showing resilience and courage, and strategic thinking.

“There’s a number of those capabilities like, for example, strategic thinking, that people may automatically unconsciously and consciously assume that male leaders have greater expertise in. When it comes to customer skills, there’ll be unconscious biases around things like managing relationships that might reinforce females as better suited to those roles …

“Capability frameworks are an important part of the process of ­assessing an individual’s readiness for a leadership role, development needs and so on – but it is really important that the process doesn’t become just another way to reinforce systemic biases that continue to develop and promote a stereotypical leader at the expense of bringing greater diversity into the leadership team.”

Pointing to anomalies

The problem with gendered leadership models is so deeply entrenched and self-reinforcing that even academics in top business schools who are focusing on gender equity often have little choice but to point out the anomalies at their own institutions. HBS academic Boris Groysberg, and director of the HBS Race, Gender & Equity Initiative, Colleen Ammerman, note that it’s clear to them that “educational institutions such as our own have a role to play in mitigating workplace inequalities”.

“The stated mission of HBS is to educate leaders who make a difference in the world. Business leadership lacks diversity of all kinds, thereby constraining, we would argue, the potential for its positive impact on the world. Our black women graduates are systematically less likely than their peers … to see someone who looks like them in senior management and are most likely to say that their race and gender created career ­obstacles.”

Women are still outnumbered by male classmates, making up 43 per cent of the HBS class of 2021.4 In Australia about 41 per cent of MBA students are women. This is out of step with other degrees such as law and medicine where the number of female students has steadily increased to over 50 per cent.

Case studies focusing on successful business leaders are ubiquitous in many business school courses and best-selling leadership books, like Jim Collins’ Good to Great. It’s an approach associated with HBS that has been exported around the world.

Analysing HBS’s MBA curriculum revealed that three-quarters of cases taught in the first year featured male leaders. The bias in case studies is common internationally: analysis of data from global clearing house, the Case Centre, found that just 11 per cent of best-selling and award-winning cases published between 2009 and 2015 included a female protagonist. Another study, of cases published by Ivey, the second-largest case publisher, found that only 10 per cent of cases published in a one-year period featured female protagonists. Even when they ­appear, women leaders can be marginalised.

“Analysis of student evaluations also revealed that cases with women protagonists received lower rankings from male students, and anecdotal feedback suggested cases highlighting accomplished women sometimes were viewed with scepticism.”

Research into the archives of the Harvard Business Review showed that there was a lot of discussion about women’s leadership styles and whether women were changing the face of leadership in the late 1980s and early 1990s, Colleen Ammerman told me. Nevertheless, when you think of iconic leaders today, she said, they exhibit pretty traditional masculine traits, which we really still associate with leadership.

“I do think there’s some progress that has been made in talking about how leadership should be different from the traditional command and control model, and how qualities that women tend to bring to bear are important to being an effective leader. That’s the whole transactional versus transformational leadership notion, and research has demonstrated that women tend to be quite good at transformational leadership. I think business schools have spent a lot of time talking about that, and at HBS certainly trying to evolve how we characterise leadership, in light of that more nuanced understanding.”

Given the continuing male bias woven through leadership teaching, siphoning women into their own leadership courses sounds like a solution. But it can sometimes add to the problems. Some of these programs are bolted onto ­existing curriculum, which can frame women as needing special attention to make the grade. I should stress that this remedial approach to women is the core problem here, but not necessarily networks that support women by acknowledging and offering different ways of addressing sexism and barriers.

The male bias is also reflected in popular leadership theories. These tend to be cyclical, with a wave of interest in models such as servant, transformational and authentic leadership spreading before being replaced by another version. But one part of these frameworks has been remarkably consistent; they tend to have a strong adherence to a limited set of individual characteristics, a reliance on heroic leaders, and little attention or allowance made for gender, according to Professor Terrance Fitzsimmons of University of Queensland Business School.

In a review of leadership theories, Fitzsimmons found that the emphasis is usually on a traditionally powerful gender and racial group, and this continues to prevent access to corporate leadership for diverse individuals. A review of contemporary leadership research found only 5 per cent of articles related to the examination of participative or shared leadership, even though it is hypothesised that shared models of leadership dominated most of human history. Researchers focus on heroic models of leadership, perhaps because these reflect male hierarchical ways of leading and dominate nearly every institutional setting researchers are likely to encounter.

Leadership approaches haven’t shifted a lot, said Fitzsimmons.

A fascinating example is authentic leadership, with research into what it means and how it works in organisations, highlighting some potential traps for women and marginalised groups. Interest in the approach peaked around 20 years ago, but while there has been another burst of interest more recently, there’s not a lot of clarity around what it means or how to “become” authentic, Global Institute for Women’s Leadership (GIWL) researcher ­Alexandra Fisher explained.

“The original approach was a very trait-based understanding of individual authenticity. Now the more popular approach is that it’s a state or an experience. But what’s considered authentic is often based on the norms of the mainstream, which is usually a masculine framework.”

Your ability to be authentic has been found to be linked to power, Fisher says, so the more power you have within an organisation, the more autonomy you have, and the more “authentic” you feel.

There’s another model that has captured attention in recent years: the vulnerable leader, popularised by influential US guru Brené Brown. Urging women to be “vulnerable” strikes me as particularly fraught in many workplaces where they are already marginalised and subject to bias. It’s a message – like the confidence mantra – profoundly gendered, with the main target white, middleclass women, according to UK researchers Shani Orgad and Rosalind Gill.

The reaction to a powerful white man who says he’s vulnerable is likely to be very different – and more positive – than to a woman making the same claims. Even telling women to spurn perfectionism and the Wonder Woman model and embrace their vulnerable side is a site of privilege.

“After all, in times of such sharp and divisive inequalities, insecurity, and precarity, very few individuals can afford to be seen to be weak, vulnerable, and lacking control and to deliberately refuse the confidence imperative,” say Orgad and Gill.

Not keeping with times

Educator and Women’s Business and Politics in Colour founder, Kat Henaway, says the way the business schools are teaching in Australia is not keeping up with the times and is incredibly antiquated.

“I find that universities are regurgitating a lot of old rubbish because we have older white men holding onto their professorial ­positions and teaching the outdated business theories from the 1800s and 1900s. People going into business education are being taught an old, old white man’s view of how business works.”

Melbourne University senior lecturer in leadership Victor Sojo Monzon teaches leadership courses to undergraduates and he makes sure he shows them pictures of different kinds of leaders such as Donald Trump but also Hugo Chavez from Venezuela. This duo share some core characteristics: they are both very charismatic and really toxic people, even though they are from different sides of the political spectrum. He also shows images of US senator Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Malala Yousafzai and the Dalai Lama.

“So I’m trying to show them different ethnic backgrounds, sexual orientation, gender identity and people with disability, so that they start to see that there are different people who could make it to leadership. But whether I like it or not, once they go into contemporary workplaces in Australia, that is not exactly what they see.

“While the last 10 years were better than the last 20 years, relatively speaking, there are very

few cases dealing with just having women in positions of leadership.”

Breaking the Boss Bias

Catherine Fox is a journalist and consultant and author of six books, including Breaking the Boss Bias: How to get more women into leadership (NewSouth, $34.99) to be published next week. This is an edited extract.