Hiring women into senior leadership positions is associated with a reduction in gender stereotypes in organizational language.

ABSTRACT: Women continue to be underrepresented in leadership positions. This underrepresentation is at least partly driven by gender stereotypes that associate men, but not women, with achievement-oriented, agentic traits (e.g., assertive and decisive). These stereotypes are expressed and perpetuated in language, with women being described in less agentic terms than men. The present research suggests that appointing women to the top tiers of management can mitigate these deep-rooted stereotypes that are expressed in language. We use natural language processing techniques to analyze over 43,000 documents containing 1.23 billion words, finding that hiring female chief executive officers and board members is associated with changes in organizations' use of language, such that the semantic meaning of b

SUBMITTER: Lawson MA 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC8892313 | biostudies-literature | 2022 Mar

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature