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First, I wish to explain my choice of terminology on the gender side of the gender-leadership linkage. (On the leadership side of this linkage, I use the terms “leader” and “manager” interchangeably as in the leadership literature.) Some scholars distinguish between sex and gender (e.g., Archer & Lloyd, 2002; Lippa, 2005; Unger, 1979). When this distinction is made, the term “sex” is used to refer to the demographic characteristic that is associated with biological characteristics of individuals such as their physiological properties and reproductive apparatus, whereas the term “gender” is used to refer to the psychosocial implications of being female or male. These implications include gender stereotypes, defined as beliefs about the psychological traits that are characteristic of males vis-à-vis females (Ellemers, 2018); gender (or “sex-role”) identity, defined as beliefs about the extent to which one possesses traits associated with gender stereotypes (Bem, 1974); gender roles, defined as beliefs about the behaviors that are appropriate for males vis-à-vis females (Wood & Eagly, 2010); gender socialization, defined as the processes by which individuals learn gender stereotypes and roles beginning in childhood (Martin & Ruble, 2009); gender schemas, defined as multifaceted, internally consistent sets of ideas that people have about gender (Bem, 1993); and so on. This distinction refers to sex as “something that ‘is,’” whereas it refers to gender as “something that is ‘done,’ ‘accomplished,’ or ‘performed’” (Ahl, 2006, p. 597). The distinction can be important. For example, sex as a biological variable and gender as a socially constructed variable have differential consequences for human health (Cretella et al., 2019).

However, many scholars have relied on the term “gender” to refer to the phenomena being studied, including similarities and differences in the attitudes, behaviors, skills, values, and interests exhibited by females when compared with males (often referred to as gender, not sex, similarities and differences; e.g., Hyde, 2005, 2014) and gender-related phenomena such as those described above (gender stereotypes, identities, roles, socialization, schemas, etc.). These phenomena also include the processes by which institutions such as organizations, economies, and societies become “gendered” or “do gender” (Acker, 1990; Calás & Smircich, 1996; Ridgeway, 1991; Risman, 2004; West & Zimmerman, 1987). For example, gendered organizational processes may include gendered divisions of labor, authority, and the value of work; gendered perpetration of and reactions to sexual harassment; and gendered symbols and images in advertising and publicity materials (Broadbridge & Hearn, 2008). Accordingly, rather than distinguish between sex and gender as in much of my prior research (see Powell, 2019), I use the term gender throughout this book to avoid possible confusion and to be consistent with prevailing terminology in the gender (not sex and gender) literature.

Now that we have settled on terminology, it is important to acknowledge that gender, when considered as a demographic characteristic, does not constitute a binary variable and may be continuous (Hyde et al., 2019; Reilly, 2019); that is, not all people may be classified as being either exclusively female or exclusively male. For example, intersex people possess physical characteristics associated with both females and males, and transgender people identify with a gender different from the one assigned at birth and may undergo a physical transition so that they become members of the gender with which they identify (Köllen, 2016). However, because most scholarship on the linkage between gender and leadership has examined the experiences of women vis-à-vis those of men when group comparisons have been made, I will focus on this distinction in the book.

Many theories have been offered and much research has been conducted on various aspects of the linkage between gender and leadership. Early scholars tended to distinguish between person-centered theories, which focus on the suitability of women's traits, skills, and behaviors vis-à-vis those of men for leader roles, and situation-centered theories, which focus on the influence of work environments experienced by women vis-à-vis men in leader roles (Riger & Galligan, 1980). More recently, the emphasis of scholarly attention has shifted to social-system-centered theories, which focus on gendered societal processes that influence the enactment of leadership (Calás et al., 2014). Blurring the distinction between these types of theories, social-system-centered theories may be offered for person-centered and situation-centered phenomena, and situation-centered theories may be offered for person-centered phenomena. Examples of person-centered, situation-centered, and social-system-centered theories and both confirming and disconfirming evidence will be provided throughout the book.

Intersectionality refers to the notion that multiple identities intersect or overlap to shape individuals’ experiences in complex ways (Acker, 2006; Ridgeway & Kricheli-Katz, 2013; Rodriguez et al., 2016; Rosette et al., 2018). Although the book is intended to focus primarily on the linkage between gender and leadership, the intersection of gender and other personal characteristics such as race and ethnicity, sexual orientation, national origin, religion, socioeconomic class, age, and so on may also be linked to leadership. However, issues of intersectionality are frequently ignored in research.

For example, most studies of the linkage between gender and leadership have not examined the influence of the racial or ethnic group of the individuals who were the focus of the study. By ignoring issues of race and ethnicity, such studies reflect an underlying assumption that gender similarities and differences in leadership-related phenomena are essentially the same for members of different racial and ethnic groups (Smooth, 2010). When the intersection of gender and other personal characteristics such as sexual orientation (Bowleg, 2008) and national origin and religion (Arifeen & Gatrell, 2020) is factored in, the list of assumptions previously made about gender similarities and differences in leadership-related phenomena across members of different groups grows. We need to guard against making such assumptions ourselves.

Finally, it is important to address what makes gender differences in leadership-related phenomena meaningful. A massive literature has accumulated over time on similarities and differences between women and men in almost everything measurable, and reviews of this literature go back more than a century (e.g., Kumra et al., 2014; Maccoby & Jacklin, 1974; Woolley, 1910). Over time, the nature of literature reviews on gender similarities and differences has shifted from narrative reviews to meta-analyses, which synthesize statistical evidence from different research studies on the same topic (Hyde & Grabe, 2008). As this shift has occurred, a heated debate has arisen over what constitutes a large, moderate, or small gender difference in meta-analytic results and what the implications of the magnitude of the difference are (e.g., Eagly, 1995, 2018; Hyde, 2005, 2014). On the one hand, Hyde (2005, p. 589) argued that most gender differences are in what may be considered a close-to-zero or small range, thereby supporting a “gender similarities” hypothesis over inflated claims of widespread gender differences. On the other hand, Eagly (1995) argued that a feminist political agenda devoted to disproving gender stereotypes has contributed to scholars’ inaccurately minimizing gender differences and exaggerating gender similarities.

In response to this debate as it emerged, Martell et al. (1996) conducted a computer simulation that yielded intriguing results. They specified a hypothetical organization with eight hierarchical levels occupied by 500 employees at the bottom level, ten employees at the top level, and an equal number of women and men initially at each level. In this organization, consistent with meta-analytic findings that women's work is evaluated less favorably than men's work (Eagly et al., 1992), a performance evaluation system added “bias points” to the performance score of each male employee such that 1% of the variance in performance scores was attributable to gender. The simulation began with removing 15% of the jobholders at each level; open positions were then filled from within the organization by promoting candidates from the level below with the highest performance scores. Averaging across multiple simulation runs, even though half of the top-level positions were specified as filled by women at the onset, only 35% of top management positions were filled by women in the end. In other words, a slightly unequal playing field favoring men at the beginning of the simulation led to men holding almost two-thirds of top management positions by its end.

The simulation demonstrated that, as Martell and colleagues (1996, p. 158) put it, “a little bias hurt women a lot.” The researchers concluded, “The effects of male-female differences are best determined not by the magnitude of the effect but its consequences in natural settings.” Their study demonstrated the considerable practical importance of what may seem to be small gender differences, in this case a 1% difference favoring men in performance evaluation scores that influenced leader promotions. Even extremely small gender differences in a leadership-related phenomenon may have a cumulatively large effect over time, which in my opinion renders such differences definitely meaningful.