Women and racialized CEOs may outperform their peers because they face tougher barriers to the top
Every so often, a headline declares that women make better leaders. A widely cited 2019 Harvard Business Review analysis, for instance, found women outscored men on most leadership competencies.
The article discusses a study that found women and racialized CEOs may outperform their peers because they face tougher barriers to reaching the top. While women and men may have similar psychological traits, women may face additional challenges such as less access to informal networks, greater scrutiny of their performance, and persistent assumptions about their competence and suitability for leadership.
Similarly, racialized executives face both gender and racial discrimination in their career advancement. The study analyzed data on over 11,000 large, publicly traded companies in the United States between 1998 and 2013 and found that firms led by racialized women posted the strongest financial performance, followed by white women, then racialized men.
White men, who made up most CEOs in the sample, came in at the bottom. This pattern is difficult to explain by a simple gender or diversity advantage story, but is consistent with a filtering explanation, where the more barriers a group faces on the way up, the more exceptional the people who make it through are likely to be.
Brief written by urgent.news from Phys.org's own syndicated text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.
