Great expectations: How gender bias is limiting women in leadership

PhD candidate Karryna Madison

November 16 2023

Are women leaders receiving the same support as their male counterparts? No, says PhD candidate Karryna Madison, whose passion and insights have already earned her a prestigious VC's award and a global accolade. 

Women have been shattering glass ceilings and blazing a trail through Australian workplaces for decades.

However, despite these strides towards workplace gender equality, the Federal Government’s latest WGEA Gender Equality Scorecard paints a very different picture.

While women constitute 51 per cent of the workforce, they still remain significantly underrepresented in leadership, holding just 41 per cent of managerial positions.

But Department of Management PhD student Karryna Madison, who also teaches the undergraduate unit Leadership Principals and Practices, is determined to pave a better way for our future women leaders.

Ms Madison, has just received a 2023 Vice-Chancellor's Education Excellence Award, with Acting Provost and Senior Vice-President Prof Sharon Pickering describing her as a "passionate leadership educator who empowers students to recognise their leadership potential".

Her insights are driven by her work outside the classroom - new research that could reveal a likely cause of the entrenched leadership gap.

Ms Madison is examining the impact of gender bias in relation to reciprocity – a cornerstone in human interactions, especially in leadership, she said.

This research was nominated for Best Paper award at the recent global 2023 Academy of Management Annual Meeting in Boston, USA.

“The idea is simple: if your leader helps you, it's expected you'll return the favour,” Ms Madison said.

“While the principle is well-established in research, what fascinates me is how gender role expectations add layers of complexity to it.

Society tends to expect women to be more nurturing and helpful, even when in leadership roles.”

This bias was a catalyst for a critical question: Do gender expectations influence the way we perceive leaders’ behaviour?

I found followers are more likely to reciprocate their male leaders' helping behaviour than women leaders"

To find out, Ms Madison embarked on a series of studies - and the results were eye-opening.

“Across multiple empirical studies, I found that followers are more likely to reciprocate their male leaders' helping behaviour than women leaders,” she said.

“This raises critical questions about the role of gender bias in workplace dynamics.”

Her work challenges the prevailing belief that women naturally benefit from communal leadership styles, such as servant leadership, due to societal gender role expectations.

“Far from receiving an advantage, women leaders may face subtle, yet significant, barriers in eliciting reciprocation from their followers,” she said.

Her supervisor, Associate Professor Dr Nathan Eva, said the research had profound implications.

“As much as we would like to believe that we as individuals and workplaces are getting better at treating all leaders as equal, Ms Madison’s studies show that progress isn't being made - that there is still a significant gender bias in how we react to leaders,” A/Prof Eva said.

“Worryingly, Karryna's results suggest that men leaders are getting much more support from their employees than women leaders are, and this is going to have impacts down the line in terms of promotion, performance, and pay.”

A/Prof Eva said the research would help organisations, policymakers, and leaders to think about how we are evaluating leaders, how we are training workforces, and how we are designing performance and promotion criteria to ensure that all leaders are on equal footing.

Looking ahead, Ms Madison said she was determined to continue to question common assumptions about leadership, both in and outside the classroom.

“I'm driven by the opportunity to encourage people to think differently about leadership, helping them redefine what leadership means and discover their own leadership potential,” Ms Madison said.

“It's not just about advancing the field; it's about reshaping how we view leadership and who gets to lead.”