The Psychology of Gender 4th Edition

Communication 245

characteristics imply a lack of communal

characteristics among women—and a lack

of communal characteristics is detrimen-

tal to women. When Hillary Clinton ran for

the Democratic nominee for president of the

United States, her strong, decisive, and overall

agentic manner was judged harshly. Her rat-

ings became more positive after a brief epi-

sode in which she shed a tear in response to an

interviewer asking her how she was able to get

out of the house everyday to hit the campaign

trail. The expression of emotion reminded

people of her communal qualities.

To be effective leaders, research sug-

gests that women need to combine agentic

qualities with communal qualities (Johnson

et al., 2008). One study showed that provid-

ing information about a leader’s communal

traits offset the penalty applied to agentic

women (Heilman & Okimoto, 2007). Col-

lege students read vignettes about a manager

of a finance department (masculine occupa-

tion) that either contained communal infor-

mation (i.e., caring and sensitive), positive

noncommunal information (fair minded), or

no additional information. The woman was

perceived as less desirable as a boss, more

hostile, and less likeable than the man in the

control and noncommunal conditions, but

these biases disappeared in the communal

condition, as shown in Figure 7.8.

Another way that women can overcome

the bias against female leaders is to establish a

“shared identity” with others. This was dem-

onstrated in a study of college students who

listened to a recording of a female speaker

who used assertive or tentative language and

was referred to as either a typical female (sex

salient) or a typical college student (student

salient; Reid et al., 2009). When her sex was

made salient, men were more influenced

by the tentative than the assertive speaker,

FIGURE 7.8 Women were viewed as less desirable than men as a

boss in the control condition and the positive noncommunal infor-

mation condition but there was no sex difference in desirability when

communal information was provided.

Source: Adapted from Heilman and Okimoto (2007).

2

0

4

6

8

Male Female Male Female Male Female

Communal

Boss Desirability

Positive

Non-Communal

Control

n.s.

M07_HELG0185_04_SE_C07.indd 245 6/21/11 8:11 AM