How Women Manage the Gendered Norms of Leadership

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A wealth of research shows that female leaders, much more than male leaders, face the need to be warm and nice, as well as competent or tough. The problem is that these qualities are often seen as opposites. Alleviating this double bind requires changing our deeply-embedded societal expectations for what it means to be a woman and what it takes to lead. But until we get there, women still have to navigate the many tensions that come with leading. Researchers wanted to know how successful women experience and manage these paradoxical demands on a day-to-day basis. They interviewed 64 top-level women leaders from 51 different organizations in the United States. They found these women have to confront a number of paradoxes that stem from the need to be tough and nice, and they identified a few strategies these leaders use to manage them.