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

Procedure. Two female experimenters attended a meeting of the San Carlos Rotary Club. Copies of the questionnaire were distributed randomly to Rotarians as they entered the meeting room. Participants were told in the instructions sheet that the study was examining interpersonal attraction, and at the top of each questionnaire, further instructions were given to each participant as to which leader (of eight) he would evaluate. After reading and signing the consent form, participants were shown the eight video clips. After watching the videos, each participant filled out a questionnaire, evaluating only the leader he had been assigned to evaluate.

Results

Male Rotary Club members completed the questionnaire (the same 14-item Leadership Inventory and additional measures of perceived warmth and genuineness as used in Experiment 1), giving their perceptions of the speaker. A test of the reliability of the 14-item inventory returned a Cronbach's alpha value of .98. We created a single measure of perceived leadership by taking the mean of all 14 items. Since we predicted no effect of speaker, we collapsed across speakers, resulting in a 2 (mindless or mindful) by 2 (cool or warm) between-subjects factorial. Any effect of speaker would enter the model as noise, and thus collapsing across speakers provided a more conservative test of the hypotheses.

Perceived leadership. To examine the effect of mindfulness and gender presentation style on male participants' perceptions of a female leader, we conducted a two-way analysis of variance (ANOVA) on the dependent variable of leadership. Means and standard deviations appear in Table 2. There was a significant effect of presentation style (warm or cool), F(1, 38) = 11.71, p = .001, r = .49, but not of mindfulness, F(1, 38) = l.38,p = .25, r = .19, on perceptions of leadership. There was a significant Presentation Style x Mindfulness interaction, F(1, 38) = 7.939, p = .008, r = .42, on perceptions of leadership. A post hoc Tukey's test of honestly significant differences, at an alpha level of p [less than] .05, found that the cool, mindless speakers were perceived as poorer leaders than the other three types of speakers.

Genuineness. Participants perceived the mindful speakers to be more genuine than the mindless speakers, F(1, 38) = 4.08, p = .05, r = .31. Participants also perceived the warm speakers to be more genuine than the cool speakers, F(1, 38) = 7.41, p = .01, r = .40. The Presentation Style x Mindfulness interaction on perceptions of genuineness was significant, F(1, 38) = 7.28, p = .01, r = .40. A post hoc Tukey's test of honestly significant differences found that the cool, mindless speakers were perceived as less genuine than the other three types of speakers, at an alpha level of p [less than] .05.

Warmth. Participants rated the warm speakers significantly warmer than they did the cool speakers, F(1, 38) = 9.29, p = .004, r = .44 (means and standard deviations appear in Table 2). Participants in the mindful speaker conditions rated the speakers nonsignificantly warmer than did participants in the mindless speaker conditions, F(1, 38) = 2.82, p = .10, r= .26. The Presentation Style x Mindfulness interaction on ratings of warmth was nonsignificant, F(1, 38) = 4.30, p = .45, r = .32. A post hoc Tukey's test of honestly significant differences found that the cool, mindless speakers were perceived as less warm than the other three types of speakers, at an alpha level of p [less than] .05.