AMY BERNSTEIN: You are listening to Women at Work from Harvard Business Review. I’m Amy Bernstein.
AMY GALLO: And I’m Amy Gallo. Welcome to season 10 of our show. It was hard to imagine starting this season with any other topic than the possibility that Kamala Harris might become the first female president of the United States.
AMY BERNSTEIN: And the question of what her presidency would mean to us. What we as working women stand to gain or lose in terms of status and power, and perhaps even more importantly, our sense of possibility. I guess the question here is, what’s the true value of representation?
AMY GALLO: We know there’s value in seeing people like yourself in positions of power. It allows you to imagine yourself in those same roles. I actually once, way back, thought I might be in VP Harris’s shoes. My diary from the second grade had a blank line in the inside cover where you were supposed to write your name, and I wrote, “Amy Gallo, first female president of the United States.”
AMY BERNSTEIN: Amy, that image of ambitious eight-year-old you gives me so much joy.
AMY GALLO: Yeah, I definitely did not understand what it would take to achieve that goal, clearly, but I love that I thought it was possible, and I know that eight-year-old me would’ve been thrilled watching the enthusiasm and excitement around VP Harris’s campaign and knowing that there have been a number of women who have been in the running for this position. But I can also see little me hand on hip, head tilted asking, “what took so long?”
AMY BERNSTEIN: When you shared these thoughts in the Women at Work newsletter, several readers responded with their own reflections. Emily, for instance, wrote how serving as a female CEO in a male-dominated industry allowed her to change the tone of conversations at her company, making them more equitable.
AMY GALLO: We also heard from Samantha, and she explained how at her previous job, HR was the only department that a woman led. So, when she was applying for a new job also in a male-dominated field and learned that the company’s COO was a woman, she felt encouraged. “Knowing that the male leadership recognizes and understands the contributions women are able to make,” she wrote, gave her greater confidence that she too could make a difference there.
AMY BERNSTEIN: For Sanita, who’s from Latvia, women being in charge has – for most of her career – been the norm, not the exception. She had the example of, Vaira Vike-Freiberga was Latvia’s president from 1999 to 2007. There were also a lot of female executives at the healthcare company where Sanita worked for a long time. “Their steady presence,” she writes, “supported development of healthy self-worth connected to my success and achievements versus running an internal debate or narrative about being female rather than male.”
AMY GALLO: All of these responses – and there were lots more – emphasize that representation matters, and that’s what we’re exploring in this episode.
AMY BERNSTEIN: We won’t be debating the merits of individual candidates. Instead, we’re going to focus on what breaking this highest glass ceiling could mean for all of us.
AMY GALLO: Farida Jalalzai and Laura Morgan Roberts are here to unpack the symbolic and practical effects of having a woman in a top leadership position. Farida is a political science professor at Virginia Tech. She studies women globally who have been heads of state – the conditions that allow them to rise to power, their experiences once they’re in office, and the legacy they leave on society.
AMY BERNSTEIN: Laura is a regular contributor to HBR. She’s a professor at the University of Virginia’s Darden School of Business, and she studies how a diverse mix of leaders can shape company culture and how it affects the way people work together. Farida, you study the effects of women leaders, presidents, prime ministers on the working women in their countries. What kinds of positive changes do you expect if the United States elects its first woman president?
FARIDA JALALZAI: One of the effects that I would expect would be the role model effect. This is essentially this idea that seeing women in positions of power would lead one to believe that you belong in that political space, that you belong as public leaders, or even that you belong in rooms that have generally been closed off to you because of male dominance.
AMY GALLO: What about you, Laura? What expectations do you have if we do elect the first female president?
LAURA MORGAN ROBERTS: Well, in addition to the symbolic effects, which are very powerful in terms of representation, I think it will expand and change the prototype for everyone – not just for people who identify as women, but it will expand the ways that we think about and construe legitimate powerful humans in our society. And we have anchored for so long on a certain prototype for leaders. And so, when you’re talking about a political leader, and particularly at the highest level of leadership in a country like the United States of America, you’re talking about changing the prototype. And that has, I think, profound effects for people, young and old from a wide range of backgrounds. So, I think I would start there on symbolism.
AMY BERNSTEIN: So, I’d like to dig into that a little bit. What specifically are the effects and how do they show up?
FARIDA JALALZAI: It can show up in different ways. Men and women actually demonstrate higher levels of political interest when they have women at the helm. In my work, in my global work, I have found that both men and women end up becoming more supportive of women leaders in places where women have led. And it’s not explained by the fact that, oh, it’s these more egalitarian countries where women come to lead, and that’s why. My work actually confirms that there are many, many patterns in countries that some countries are not very egalitarian and they’ve elected or appointed women.
AMY GALLO: Can you give us an example of what that looks like in a country maybe that’s less egalitarian, where they’ve elected a female leader, and then how does that impact the women in that country?
FARIDA JALALZAI: Yes. I can share maybe a story and just the inspiration really for why I do what I do.
AMY GALLO: That’d be great.
FARIDA JALALZAI: I’m the daughter of Pakistani immigrants, and when I would visit my extended family in Pakistan, it was very noticeable to me that there were lots of different restrictions on women’s mobility. Just literally the spaces they could occupy and limitations on their educational attainment, professional attainment. Whilst there was a woman who was prime minister, Benazir Bhutto – the late Benazir Bhutto. There really is a more complicated story of why women are able to gain power in some settings and in Pakistan, really it does go to this aspect of family connections to power. So, Benazir Bhutto wasn’t just any woman. She was a privileged woman and her father had been prime minister and president of the country. The family connection that men also benefit from tend not to be scrutinized, but women’s family connections tend to be, or they’re viewed as, “This is the only reason why you’re here.” And in Benazir Bhutto’s case, politically unstable setting in a country where the military pulled so many of the levers of power, just because you have a woman at the helm, it doesn’t necessarily at all indicate that gender equality has been achieved. There’s just so many different factors that maybe led a woman to be able to govern at a particular point in history, but ultimately, that culture never completely shifted at all.
AMY BERNSTEIN: The context you’re saying really, really matters.
FARIDA JALALZAI: It’s really important.
AMY GALLO: So, Laura, what’s your sense of the context that Kamala Harris, for example, is in at this moment in the US?
LAURA MORGAN ROBERTS: Well, that’s…
AMY GALLO: That’s a big question. Can you just describe the entire history of the United States right now?
LAURA MORGAN ROBERTS: Sure.
AMY GALLO: But to build on what Farida was saying, I’m wondering, for us to benefit the ways in which you and Farida have described from a woman in power, do you feel the United States has the right context for this to be a benefit to us?
LAURA MORGAN ROBERTS: Yes. It is a great question, and really I pause because I have no shortage of thoughts on this topic, so I’m trying to select which one to start with. So, the first thing I think is important to emphasize that would translate across all conversations around gender and leadership is no leader stands alone. So, leadership is a process. It’s a set of practices. It’s a dynamic of influence, and so the degree to which you’re able to have influence depends on a wide range of factors. Your title, even if you’re an elected official, is only one source of power. Even if you are the person who can sign the executive order, crafting something in a bubble and then bringing it to the table is extremely unlikely especially in our current state of a democratic society in the United States of America. That’s not how we have governed historically here. So, there are a number of factors, when we talk about the context here in the US, that we would consider. We would consider, first and foremost, who are the other members of the senior leadership team, right? Translation would be cabinet, right? Who are other key stakeholders? That would be Congress. What are the other bodies that will shape and influence the mandate for leadership, the scope of leadership? What we prioritize or not? The court system plays a huge role in that.
Then of course, there are the voters. But it’s not just the popular vote – one vote, one person. There are all of these other layers of coalition building and pooled influence. So, the symbolism is very powerful. But getting things done is a completely different process once you’re in office. So, where are we now in this moment? Are we prepared not just to elect a woman at the highest tier of leadership for the country? Are we prepared to follow this woman? We’re not talking about someone who has no leadership experience in the federal government today. And years before when we found ourselves in this position previously, not that long ago… Again, we were not talking about a novice. We’re talking about two people, two women who have well-crafted paths to power, who have been as proximate to the presidency of the United States as anyone could possibly be, by virtue of marriage, by virtue of cabinet membership, by virtue of currently being the vice president of the United States. So, I think it is fascinating that even when you look at someone or some people who don’t fit the male prototype that we’ve had for every president since the founding of the United States of America, they still have, as do so many women at very senior levels in organizations and in government, quite extensive dossier of leadership experience. But the question mark still hovers over them in a very abstract, but sometimes a very targeted and personalized way as to whether or not this person is really capable of getting anything done.
Now, the third piece is, I don’t want to leave hanging the fact that even though we’re talking about gender and women in leadership, there are a wide range of women with a wide range of programmatic interests, values, beliefs, priorities, which would translate into a leadership agenda. So, A doesn’t always equal B. We have seen this movie before, and the people who you would think would demographically map most closely on a particular candidate actually did not support the candidate in the majority numbers, a minority. Only 45% of white women supported a white woman candidate, but 98% of black women supported a white woman candidate for a presidential election. So, I think there’s more nuance to the story. There’s intersectionality. There are some questions about policy and how people decide who they think best represents their interest. Sometimes that aligns around gender or other demographic indicators, but other times it does not, and they’re thinking about representation in a very different way.
AMY BERNSTEIN: So, I’d love to dig into what you were just talking about, Laura. You talked about this kind of visceral thing that can happen. If Kamala Harris is elected, there will be people whose expectations soar. There will be joy for some people, but the expectations will soar. Now any newly elected president, any president-elect then has to manage expectations. Our first woman president will have extraordinary expectations to manage, and those expectations, as you just said, will be both very positive and supportive, but some will also be very negative, and will expect her to fail and maybe even hope for her to fail just to prove them right. What would you say to president-elect Harris about managing expectations?
LAURA MORGAN ROBERTS: Oh, wow. So, it’s tricky, right? It’s tricky for a few reasons. Oftentimes, non-prototypical leaders, women leaders, black leaders in the United States come into positions when it’s this glass-cliff moment. There’s a lot at stake, but people are also feeling like, Well, we might as well try this path because door number one and door number two don’t seem to be playing out the ways that we wished or hoped that they would.
So, when we talk about the raised expectations, it’s twofold. It’s, one, that people have this sense of enthusiasm and excitement and, Oh, finally we’ve been waiting for this moment and finally, it’s hard for anybody to live up to that. Because again, leadership is not about what one individual is able to do. Leadership is always about the collective, but the situation is also quite unstable right now. So, the challenge is very high. My advice would be to continue to almost narrate the impossible, which is to build confidence in one’s own desire, commitment, ability to lead, concern for the masses, but also be very clear about the amount of work that is going to take for us as a nation to continue to confront the wide array of things that are not within our direct control, but will certainly impact us geopolitically, economically, and so forth.
The third thing that has to happen – and I think so many of us are aware of this and this is why we’re having this conversation right now – I believe so much healing needs to take place in the nation. What is a context is deeply divided. Tremendous misunderstanding. I would encourage anyone taking leadership who truly cares about healing and sustaining the planet, not just the nation, but the entire planet, to continue to invest in the work of diversity, equity, and inclusion, because that is the core capability upon which all of these other dynamics are going to unfold.
AMY GALLO: And I have to wonder, given what we know about the gender stereotypes around women being caring, maternal, if that expectation of the last one you referenced, Laura, around healing, would be even higher for Kamala Harris than it would for someone else.
LAURA MORGAN ROBERTS: Absolutely. I mean, and some of that is set up currently in the messaging. One of the most prominent advertisements, Kamala Harris is speaking from the vantage point of her previous experience as a prosecutor, as a DA, which is not typically something that you consider the most nurturing or caring of roles.
AMY GALLO: True.
LAURA MORGAN ROBERTS: So, there’s a gender divergence there between the experience and that nurturing stereotype. The way that she narrates that experience is, whenever I came to help people or to support people, I never asked are you this? Are you that? I simply said, ‘Are you okay?’ Because that’s what was most important. So, when I hear that as somebody who thinks about gender and its intersections in leadership, I hear there’s some messaging, there’s some signaling here about this caring, nurturing side because we know that women leaders have to walk a fine line between being seen as decisive, as courageous, as not delicate, not fragile, so tough in some way, but at the same time, warm, nurturing and carrying. And that’s a hard line for anybody to walk.
AMY GALLO: Yeah. Farida, when you hear those expectations as Laura has laid them out, thinking about other examples of heads of state and other countries, how have you seen female leaders navigate those daunting expectations for them? And again, acknowledging the context is crucial. But I’m curious if you’ve seen good examples, positive examples of how women leaders have done that?
FARIDA JALALZAI: It’s really difficult. I think one of the better cases was in New Zealand, and I’m sure we all know Jacinda Ardern. She became a household name. And I had a Fulbright and studied there recently. What I took away from her case was she was able to offer this humanity to the country and actually to the world at a time that we needed humanity. Thinking about, of course, COVID, and she dealt with Christchurch massacre, the aftermath of the White Island Volcano eruptions. She’s a good example of someone who time and time again showed this priority of bringing people together, and again, the humanity. The humanity that she showed when she was stepping down from the prime ministership was a good model of democratic behavior. She said, very honestly, I don’t have enough in the tank to continue. Not being in power for the power’s sake, but being in a role that you feel compelled to be and because you know that what you’re going to be able to do with your influence is for the greater good.
AMY BERNSTEIN: Didn’t Jacinda Ardern do all of this while pregnant and then with a newborn in her office?
FARIDA JALALZAI: Yeah. She was actually, I want to say the second world leader – woman world leader – who had a baby while she was in power.
AMY BERNSTEIN: So, what did that do for women in New Zealand? I mean, we all followed her. What did that do for women generally as they thought about their own careers?
FARIDA JALALZAI: It made it so that it was not only acceptable, but it was a model to be a mother and someone in a powerful position. Say for example, when she was at the UN speaking, her daughter was in the room. Her baby was in the room, and that sends a signal that this is a space that welcomes mothers. It welcomes families. What that does for mothers that sends the signal that they can be many, many different things, and they can be heads of state. They can be presidents. Remember when she was leaving, when she was doing her last speech, before stepping down from the prime ministership, she talked about all of the different ways that she was a person, in many ways wouldn’t be the prototype, wouldn’t be the person that would come to your imagination at first of what a prime minister is. So, that not only can bolster somebody’s own confidence in what it is that they can do, it could also chip away at those longstanding perceptions of what a leader looks like. It pushes back against the traditional images that we have of leaders. It renegotiates all of these things culturally, and that’s probably the tip of the iceberg.
AMY GALLO: Farida, what’s the evidence that Jacinda had an impact on that role model effect – that actually there was a shift in public perception of women as leaders?
FARIDA JALALZAI: So, here’s the thing. It is extremely hard to empirically make these direct connections between the visible symbol, the woman in the position, and these are women in power.
AMY GALLO: Because you do do surveys, right, around how people perceive whether a woman is suitable for office? You’re seeing those positive benefits that women and men are more open to different types of leaders when there’s a female head of state.
FARIDA JALALZAI: In some cases. And one of the things that we haven’t talked about yet… these women are in these roles that can further diversify the political sphere by selecting other women to these key positions, maybe to their cabinet. I wrote a book on Dilma Rousseff of Brazil. She promoted many more women, actually, than her male predecessor. From the same party, she went above and beyond Lula in promoting women to positions of power and more diverse women. So, there is that potential, but not every woman is motivated in that way, and not every system is one that gives space to make those decisions. By the second term that she didn’t have as much ability to appoint who it was that she wanted because she’s bargaining with the other parties in the coalition. That’s why I always bring it back to, Well, what’s the context? There isn’t a lot of space to appoint who it is that you want, even if you’re committed to that.
And then the last thing I’ll say about… because I do want to talk about the specific cases more. When we look at Dilma Rousseff’s case, it’s sort of that cautionary tale where she does a lot in terms of the policy creation for women and these different types of cash transfer programs, expanded what Lula had done and redefined things in ways that brought in gender, class, and race that I think were very positive. But this was a threat. She was a threat because of how many times she made these different types of decisions, whether it’s policy or cabinet post appointments. And when we’re talking about leadership style, her leadership style was the opposite of Jacinda Ardern’s. I mean, there is this expectation in some settings for you to not show that you’re compassionate, that that could be a liability. Lula in Brazil was super compassionate and he would cry all the time. Dilma was not the same way, and I think that there were some hits that she took for that. Again, it’s going back to it’s never quite right because she wouldn’t have been given the space to cry. Ultimately, it’s a sad case because she’s impeached and removed from power and a good deal of our analysis in that book is about the misogynistic backlash.
AMY GALLO: Yeah. Well, and she was impeached and removed from power for corruption, all of which was true for her male counterparts and her male predecessors too, but it wasn’t raised to the level that it was raised for her.
FARIDA JALALZAI: Absolutely. So, it was a budgetary procedure, fiscal peddling. Her predecessors had done multiple cases, had engaged. And that was never something that ended up coming back to haunt them, we’ll say. But not only that, I want to say the day after she was removed from power, the Congress made that same procedure legal. So, the motivations were not really corruption.
AMY GALLO: Yeah. I mean, I think this conversation points to the challenge of deciding there’s one style that a woman in power should adapt. Obviously, as you’ve been saying, as we’ve been talking about, the context matters. But I think that the issue is when there are so few women – and I think it’s, what, 10% of countries in the world have had a female head of state, that’s a low percentage given the number of women in the world. When a woman is in that position or potentially in that position, we want them to do it all.
FARIDA JALALZAI: You want everything. to everybody.
AMY GALLO: Yeah.
FARIDA JALALZAI: You have to be everything to everybody.
AMY GALLO: Yeah. Laura, what are you thinking as you’re listening to these cases of women in political positions and how it relates to women in corporate positions?
LAURA MORGAN ROBERTS: Well, the unicorn wishlist is definitely something that translates across sectors, unfortunately. Wanting to see someone who has already demonstrated an extraordinary amount of accomplishments and has put on display a wide range of capabilities before they would even get considered for a senior leadership position is the first indicator of inequity. I have to do twice as much, five times as much, 10 times as much, prove it again, prove it again, prove it again before I can even get considered for whatever the promotion may be through election, through appointment.
What happens when we’re in positions of leadership? Again, leadership is a process. It’s a dynamic. It’s relational. There’s a leadership component. There’s a followership component. So, what we see happening over and over again are incidences of what we could call, one contested authority. So, that’s the second place inequity comes in to the fore because with contested authority, I am trying to exercise the responsibilities that I have as the incumbent in this particular role, and people are resistant directly, indirectly, or perhaps taking it farther and being subversive and actively trying to undermine the leadership agenda that I’m putting forth, and perhaps even one that the majority of people are supporting. If there are those who have power and influence who are on the fringe and not inclined to support my leadership, then my authority is constantly contested. And that’s where an interpersonal negotiation of influence is always taking place. So, that’s an extra level of work.
Then we have the identity management work that we’re talking about. How do we express different aspects of our social identities in ways that can enhance other’s perceptions of our professionalism, our competency, our character, rather than detract from it. And so, within that bucket, it’s how am I expressing my gender identity in terms of femininity versus masculinity? The things that are coded as gendered expressions can range from the way that I dress, how I style my hair, what kinds of shoes I wear, what kind of makeup I wear, all the other accoutrements that go along with that. Too much jewelry. Are my earrings too expensive or is my clothes too cheap? I am trying to thread a needle in how I embody the world’s experience or expectations around my gender category. Then there’s emotional labor. Can I express the full range of emotions or do I need to be more constrained with that and keep it safe? Right? I’m not able to be as authentic in terms of unfiltered expression, right? I have to be very strategic in calculating about how I convey these different aspects of my identity so that I’m able to maintain my position of power and influence and keep getting this buy-in.
The third part of the case study is the tragic ending that we’ve highlighted in a few of these scenarios, which there’s the rise to power. There’s what I have to navigate in order to get things done while I’m in power. And then there’s the coda, right? The epilogue. What happens at the end and how do we tell the story of what happened at the end in hindsight? And this is where the data on leadership and prototypicality are really helpful, because they show that if I’m different or diverged from the prototype, people have lower expectations of me. So, I get less credit when I succeed and I have heavier penalties when I fail. Nobody is perfect. Nobody succeeds alone and we all fall short. The issue is how those different successes and failures are construed. Who’s given the credit for those various successes, and how heavy is the penalty for the so-called failure or the shortcoming –whether it’s a lapse in judgment, whether it’s an inability to resolve a global conflict or a health crisis or an environmental challenge, whether it’s a conflict, an interpersonal conflict with other members or other parties? Everything along that continuum can lead us to conclusion that somebody just didn’t have what it takes. And like you said, if people are looking for somebody to fail and they have low expectations in the first place, it doesn’t take much evidence for them to just glitch on to a tiny incident, a tiny moment, a little falter, a little shortcoming, and be ready to withdraw their support entirely from that person. So, it’s a very precarious position, and it’s precarious for the individual, obviously, because you want to feel like you’re having a positive impact. You want to feel like you’re leaving a legacy.
AMY GALLO: Yes.
LAURA MORGAN ROBERTS: It’s also a very precarious position for people who identify with those leaders.
AMY GALLO: Right. You combine that with the role model effect, and now not only are we set up to fail or there’s different standards, but now the failure has so much more meaning.
LAURA MORGAN ROBERTS: That’s right. The failure reverberates just as strongly as the success or the anticipated or hope for success. And maybe even more so because decade upon decade, upon decade has suggested that you ought to be cautious. This is risky. You’re going to have to fight hard to beat the odds. And so, when we have situations like this, whether it’s the president of a country, whether it’s the president of the university, and for whatever reason, things don’t end in the happy way that they began. It takes a collective toll on the whole community, and it’s important for us then to also, I think, lead with humanity from wherever we are. And that means appreciating the complexity of the context and trying to recognize what people’s intentions are, being educated on their policy initiatives, looking beyond whatever box they might check demographically to make assumptions about what they’re doing or not doing, what they’re able to do or not do. Look at their actual record and have a substantive conversation about that and use that as a much more fair and equitable gauge of someone’s leadership accomplishments and impact.
I’m not suggesting that we be gender blind. I’m not suggesting that we be colorblind. I believe wholeheartedly based on decades of research that our differences are an asset. They enhance the quality of our decision-making. They allow us to make better informed choices. They can help us to think outside of the box, to come up with new solutions. They can raise our awareness and consciousness of organizational and social challenges that we didn’t even know existed because they were outside of our personal realm of experience or our personal frame of reference. So, diversity around all of these dimensions, gender and race and age included, are essential for leadership and for governance. But what I’m saying is when we use those identity markers to box people in and then evaluate them unfairly, it perpetuates the inequality in our society rather than dismantling it. So, part of the responsibility is ours. Whoever gets elected has their own moral, ethical responsibility to lead in the best interest of the collective. As I like to say, to grow the good. That’s their moral and ethical responsibility, but it’s not theirs alone. We also have that responsibility as well. And many of the challenges that we’re highlighting around women in leadership, around other non-prototypical leaders, has to do with what the followers do – or those who refuse to acknowledge and follow and less about what the individual in charge does.
AMY BERNSTEIN: This has been such an interesting, insightful conversation. Farida, Laura, thank you so much.
FARIDA JALALZAI: Thank you so much.
LAURA MORGAN ROBERTS: Thank you.
AMY GALLO: That’s our show. I’m Amy Gallo.
AMY BERNSTEIN: And I’m Amy Bernstein. Women at Work‘s editorial and production team is Amanda Kersey, Maureen Hoch, Tina Tobey Mack, Rob Eckhardt, Erica Truxler, Ian Fox, and Hannah Bates. Robin Moore composed this theme music. Get in touch with us by emailing womenatwork@hbr.org.
