Why Is Leadership Riskier for Women?

Two competing theories are frequently offered to explain why women are dramatically underrepresented in the highest leadership positions, from Congress to Fortune 500 companies. Some argue that cultural norms of male leadership and even outright discrimination keep women from top roles, while others argue that women are less ambitious than men. These explanations may not be mutually exclusive, though. Research by Susan R. Fisk and Jon Overton shows that women’s leadership ambitions are depressed by the expectation that women will be disproportionately penalized for failures.

Fisk and Overton use three surveys to trace how expectations of harsher penalties for failure can dampen women’s leadership ambitions. First, they find that both women and men—but women to a greater degree—”believe that women leaders face greater sanctions for failure than otherwise similar men.” There’s good reason for that belief. Research has found, for example, that “women managers are formally penalized more harshly for committing an ethical violation than otherwise similar men managers” and “women surgeons receive a sharper drop in referrals when a patient dies than male surgeons.” Fisk and Overton’s findings suggest that this phenomenon is common knowledge.

Harsher sanctions for women leaders when things go wrong can discourage women from seeking those roles in the first place.

Second, they asked respondents to consider whether they would take on a professional leadership role with a high risk of failure. Half of the respondents were told that failure would not affect their careers: they could return to their current team and could count on support from their manager. The other half were told that failure could mean losing their job and that their manager had not pledged support. Both men and women were less likely to say they wanted the leadership role when failure carried these risks—but the effect was stronger for women.

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The final study used the same scenario as the second, but added additional controls and questions to test whether women’s lower interest in a risky leadership role could be linked to their expectation of greater sanctions for failure—and to rule out alternative explanations. The research found that “anticipated sanctions account for about 31 percent of the decrease in women’s leadership ambitions.”

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It is true, then, that women can be less likely than men to have leadership ambitions. But that is not simply an innate difference. Rather, to a significant extent, it can be a response to the greater risk women face in leadership positions. As a result, harsher sanctions for women leaders when things go wrong can discourage women from seeking those roles in the first place. As Fisk and Overton write, “gender discrimination against women leaders not only harms women leaders: this discrimination also decreases the likelihood that women pursue leadership positions in the first place.”

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