Mindful and Masculine: Freeing Women Leaders From the Constraints of Gender Roles

Journal of Social Issues, Spring, 2000 by Christine Kawakami, Judith B. White, Ellen J. Langer

Experiment 1

The purpose of Experiment 1 was to test the hypothesis that women leaders who mindfully adopt a stereotypically masculine trait (coolness) will be perceived by men as more effective leaders than women who mindlessly adopt a masculine trait. In addition, Experiment 1 provided manipulation checks on whether the mindful speakers in our video clips would be perceived as more genuine than the mindless speakers.

Method

Participants. Twenty-four male undergraduates were recruited via sign-up sheets in the dining halls and e-mail messages to dormitory lists to participate in a study on interpersonal attraction. As an incentive for students to take part in the study, two lotteries of $25 each were held.

Procedure. Participants were scheduled in small groups (1-5 people), which were randomly assigned to watch one of four videos in a dormitory common room. Two of the videos were of cool mindful female speakers and two were of cool mindless female speakers. After watching the video clip, each participant filled out a questionnaire evaluating the speaker he saw. The questionnaire, which we called the Leadership Inventory, consisted of 14 items (listed in Table 1) that were answered on Likert scales ranging from 0 (no, not at all) to 6 (yes, very much so). Two additional measures of perceived warmth and genuineness were included, also measured on Likert scales ranging from 0 (no, not at all) to 6 (yes, very much so). Upon completing the questionnaire, participants' names were entered into the lottery, and they were thanked for their participation. Participation took approximately 5 min.

Results

Male participants saw one of four speaker clips. Two of the speakers were instructed to stick to the script, and to portray interpersonal coolness (mindless, cool condition) and two speakers were instructed to make the script their own, and to convey interpersonal coolness (mindful, cool condition). We collapsed across speakers, resulting in two conditions, mindful presentation (n = 12) and mindless presentation (n = 12). Any within-cell variance attributable to differences between speakers would be noise in our design and thus provide a more conservative test of the hypothesis. An alpha level of .05 was selected. All t tests are two-tailed.

Participants completed a 14-item Leadership Inventory giving their perceptions of the speaker. A test of the reliability of the Leadership Inventory returned a Cronbach's alpha value of .96. We created a single measure, Leadership, by taking the mean of all 14 items. A high Leadership score indicated that the participant perceived the speaker to be an effective leader.

To examine the effect of a mindful speaker on male participants' perceptions of a female leader, we compared perceptions of participants who saw the mindful leaders with perceptions of those who saw the mindless leaders. Male participants perceived the mindful speakers to be better leaders (M = 2.65, SD = .81) than the mindless speakers (M = 1.00, SD = .92), t(22) = 4.66, p [less than] .001, r = .71. Male participants also perceived mindful speakers to be more genuine (M = 3.0, SD = 1.13) than the mindless speakers (M = 1.25, SD = 1.42), t(22) = 3.34, p = .003, r = .58. Male participants also perceived mindful speakers to be warmer (M = 1.83, SD = 1.27) than the mindless speakers (M= 0.33, SD = 0.65), t(22) = 3.65,p = .001, r = .61.