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Preroll: PolicyCast explores research-based policy solutions to the big problems we’re facing in our society and our world. This podcast is a production of the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University.

Intro (Hannah Riley Bowles): I think another part of the frame that I worry about, or the narrative about women's leadership, is at times an over-focus on the negatives. And the negatives are real, but if we don't balance the negatives with the extraordinary positives, then I worry that we might actually go back to that problem that Madeleine Albright raised about being a young girl and looking up and saying, “Do I see any role models? Do I see a path for myself?” And so it's so important to elevate the fact that women have run, fiercely, competitively, for the U. S. presidency. So if you are a young woman imagining that you might be able to do that, you can. We'll have to see who the first person is to actually break through into the Oval Office, but it's important not to not to undermine the important contributions that women are making in the roles that they are playing. 

Intro (Ralph Ranalli): Welcome back to PolicyCast and our fall 2024 season. I’m your host, Ralph Ranalli. With Vice President Kamala Harris making a strong bid for the U.S. presidency, ����vlog���� Women and Public Policy Program Co-Director Hannah Riley Bowles says Harris is just one of many “path-breakers” who have dramatically increased leadership opportunities for women. Yet she says the reaction to Harris’ campaign in both the media and the public sphere also shows how the popular narrative about the efficacy of female leaders still lags behind the reality of what successful women are achieving. And she says that narrative also isn’t supported by the research, including multiple studies showing that on average women are actually rated higher than men for a number of important leadership qualities associated with performance. Hannah is a recognized expert in the study of negotiation and gender and is the Roy E. Larsen Senior Lecturer in Public Policy and Management at the ����vlog����, where she also chairs the Management, Leadership, and Decision Sciences Area and recently completed her tenure as co-director of the Center for Public Leadership. She’s here with me today to talk about how women in leadership roles are really performing, the ways women can successfully attain positions of responsibility and power despite traditional obstacles, and some forward-looking policy recommendations that could make things better. 

Ralph Ranalli: Hannah, welcome to PolicyCast. 

Hannah Riley Bowles: Thank you for having me.

Ralph Ranalli: You're the co director of the Women in Public Policy Program at ����vlog����. You have also recently been co-director of the Center for Public Leadership at ����vlog����. And meanwhile, in less than two months, a woman has a good chance of being elected the leader of the country with the world's largest economy and its most powerful military. So I feel like I'm talking to the right person at the right time. Yet you say there's still a need to quote, change the narrative about women and leadership, unquote. What do you mean by that? What do you see as the current narrative about women and leadership and how does it need to change?

Hannah Riley Bowles: I actually think that the success that Kamala is having, and honestly the success in many respects that Hillary Clinton had, is a good example of the ways in which the narrative on women's leadership needs to change. So for instance, there's a forum event coming up that addresses journalist questions about: Can a woman win? And, honestly. Yes, Hillary Clinton did not win the electoral college. She did not win the election. But the majority of Americans voted for a woman for president. 

And in a lot of respects, I think that it is extremely important to focus on for the narrative with regard to women's leadership. Madeleine Albright used to have this line, I heard it once in a graduation speech she gave, about how she never imagined she would be Secretary of State when she was a young girl. And she said it wasn't because she lacked confidence. It was because she had never seen a Secretary of State in a skirt. 

Ralph Ranalli: Right. 

Hannah Riley Bowles: And she changed that conception. I mean, she was a path breaker in that regard. But nowadays, for young people to imagine a Secretary of State, we've had a whole string of folks play that role, right? Including Hillary Clinton and Condoleezza Rice. It's just no longer incongruent. And the idea of having a highly competitive, female candidate for the U. S. presidency is just simply now a fact of life. It's not incongruent at all. So this whole question of can a woman win... We'll see what happens. But Kamala Harris is already breaking the frame with regard to women's leadership and women's suitability for the presidency. There are so many people looking at her candidacy thinking, this is fabulous.

And I did not take away from Hillary not winning that a woman cannot be president. She ran a really great, frame-breaking campaign. Not good enough to win the whole thing, but she broke the frame. And Kamala Harris is breaking the frame again. And she's breaking the frame in new ways. She's breaking the frame as a woman of color. She's breaking the frame in terms of her relationship with her husband; it is just this fabulous model of partnership that I think a lot of young people can identify with, where they support one another's careers, they trade off in different times of intensity professionally. There are so many things about the role that she's playing right now that is very positive. 

I think another part of the frame that I worry about, or the narrative about women's leadership, is at times an over-focus on the negatives. And the negatives are real, but if we don't balance the negatives with the extraordinary positives, then I worry that we might actually go back to that problem that Madeleine Albright raised about being a young girl and looking up and saying, “Do I see any role models? Do I see a path for myself?” And so it's so important to elevate the fact that women have run, fiercely, competitively, for the U. S. presidency. So if you are a young woman imagining that you might be able to do that, you can. We'll have to see who the first person is to actually break through into the Oval Office, but it's important not to not to undermine the important contributions that women are making in the roles that they are playing. 

There are women world leaders all across the globe who are changing the face of what it means to be a head of state. We're honored right now to have the former New Zealand prime minister, Jacinda Ardern, as a visitor at the Harvard Kennedy School. And she stepped onto the stage as a very young person, as a young person having a child, while serving as head of state. And her leadership, particularly during COVID, and then I think also, particularly in the face of a terrorist attack with her country was so exemplary. She was somebody who stepped forward, and so many people have learned from the examples of her leadership during that period. 

Now, we have all these positive examples. We also have lots of really clear evidence that women—including some of the folks that we've been talking about—as politicians are more vulnerable to ferocious online attacks. I just went to a panel yesterday on technology-facilitated, gender-based violence. And one of the things that they were talking about is the targeting of female politicians in very kind of gendered, sexualized ways. But I want to name that threat and that problem, but not allow that to take away from the extraordinary contributions that women are able to take.

I can give you another example to connect back to some of the research we've been doing lately. And that is, I was at a panel at an important institution talking about women's leadership. And one very senior person said, "You know, people don't like women as they become leaders. They don't like female leaders." And I thought, "Oh my gosh." And actually when the statement was presented, it was: Research shows that women don't like female or the people don't like female leaders. And I thought, “Oh my gosh, could I run an experiment and get that effect? Maybe, if I manipulated all the right contexts—if you didn't know the leader, if she acted in a very authoritarian way, it was a male-dominated context, yes, I could probably show that effect. 

But there is no evidence that on a kind of global or general basis that women rising into leadership are disliked. In effect, if anything, now the meta-analyses, the studies of studies are showing women coming out on average actually rated higher than men in a lot of important leadership qualities that are associated with performance, both by followers and by people who are experts, say their bosses or trained judges who are evaluating performance. Now, I don't think that women are necessarily innately better leaders than men. I think probably there's a more competitive, difficult gauntlet for women to get up into these top positions. One argument is that you have a more select group of women in these leadership roles and that's why you're seeing those effects. But we have these global statements that are 20 years old about people not liking women as leaders or not choosing women as leaders. 

Here's another example. So we did this whole review of leadership under what conditions are men more likely to be selected as leaders than are women. So again, let me go back to those conditions in which I thought I might be able to get this effect of disliking women. I want to have a fair amount of ambiguity. You got to not know her necessarily personally or her leadership competencies because that, that will kind of open the door for stereotyping. And then I want to thrust her into a counter stereotypical role or set of behaviors that make her gender salient and that kind of violate gender-based expectations, right? So those are a set of findings related to the evaluation of women. Women are more likely to be negatively evaluated in these studies where you don't actually know a lot about their leadership competencies. You just get a quick snapshot of them and they're placed in this counter stereotypic role or counter stereotypic set of behaviors.

Now, let’s go over to the findings related to the emergence of female leaders. Men are more likely to arise as leaders in masculine stereotypic domains, but particularly if leaders are chosen within 20 minutes or less. I mean, that's pretty striking, right? 

Ralph Ranalli: Right. What do you think that means?

Hannah Riley Bowles: When you have to make a snap judgment, people do carry around these implicit associations. In fact, there are these wonderful studies that take gender aside, but just look at facial structure, that people will sort who looks like a leader into different types of roles based on the sort of stereotypic masculine characteristics or stereotypically feminine characteristics of a facial structure. 

Ralph Ranalli: We sort of default to our implicit biases, right? 

Hannah Riley Bowles: Right. Implicit biases, implicit associations. Now implicit associations come from the structure of society. Right. So if you ask somebody to lead a military type of venture, what you're going to do is you're going to conjure up what are my images of military leaders. And when you conjure that up, you're going to end up with images of people who are male, right? And so somebody who steps in with a very, say, soft features or feminine look, that's going to be incongruent with your image of an effective military leader. So in these quick judgments, yes, that's where the researchers are going to find their clearest effects, right?

Ralph Ranalli: Yeah.

Hannah Riley Bowles: There’s also very clear evidence that as we get to know people—let me talk at the group level for a moment, which is different than the political level because there are entrenched power dynamics at a very high political level—within a group level, what research shows is that, yes, well, people do make some snap judgments about what does a leader look like in the beginning in terms of who they choose to listen to or defer to or who they identify as a leader. As people work with one another over time, and they begin to recognize more clearly who is bringing which differential types of skills or competencies to the group, they tend to focus more on those things that they know about what people are contributing than to those characteristics. 

Ralph Ranalli: As I’m listening the word that keeps jumping to my mind is thoughtfulness, you know? And for me it goes back to that media example that you cited earlier. I also saw a New York Times story that asked: “Is America ready to elect a woman?” And my mind immediately went back to Hillary Clinton winning the popular vote. It just so happens that American democracy just has this systemic quirk that doesn't count the popular vote. But she was clearly the popular choice for president. And I was just sort of flabbergasted by how thoughtless that was. So I guess my question is, is there a way to build more thoughtfulness into the way leaders are chosen? Since we know that snap judgments and implicit biases result in these biased decisions, if there was a way to build some more thoughtfulness into the system of choosing leaders, could that lead to more equity?

Hannah Riley Bowles: Yes. So if you look, for instance, to the work of Iris Bohnet, where she talks about equity by design, a lot of the things that she is basically encouraging are factors. Her work and my work are very much in conversation. I’m typically looking at individual agency from the bottom up, and then she’s thinking about: Well, what are we learning from some of those things for organizational design questions? And a lot of what she is advising is basically getting people to focus more on objective criteria for their decisions, more thoughtful evaluations, not getting anchored on past bias practices. It's trying to get people connected to the work, rather than historic patterns. So absolutely. I mean, that is a kind of classic behavioral science intervention. And that's what we show also in our work is that when you have situations where people are provided with more objective criteria for the evaluation of leaders say, or for the conduct of a negotiation, if we want to talk about that work, when you have more objective information you're just less likely to get gender effects. People will focus more on the task. It’s more when they just don't know exactly how to evaluate things that they're likely to draw on some of these stereotypes or historic patterns.

But there’s another behavioral science thing that comes out of that example: Can women win? I'd like to connect this to our colleague, Todd Rogers’ work, right? 

Ralph Ranalli: Todd’s a behavioral scientist. 

Hannah Riley Bowles: Todd’s a behavioral scientist on our faculty. One of his most famous findings was showing campaigns that they get greater turnout if they say “everybody's voting” than if they say, “nobody's voting and you need to show up,” right? Because what people do is they follow the norm. And so if we keep saying, can a woman win and let me talk about how Hillary didn't win, the message that you're then sending to young people about “Is leadership a path for me?” is this narrative that's focusing on the failure frame rather than on the success frame. 

Let me draw on some other work by our colleagues. Erica Chenoweth and Zoe Marks have shown that authoritarian regimes tend to be very gendered, and they tend to emphasize traditional gender roles. I remember reading this Mussolini quote that more or less said, women serve in the home and men serve in the field, the men were supposed to be out fighting for the state and the women were supposed to be at home tending the hearth. And so, in political systems, it is not necessarily the case that if people were paying better attention and making more accurate decisions with objective criteria that you would get gender equitable outcomes. I want to be clear about that.

Ralph Ranalli: I did want to return to what you said a little bit ago you mentioned negotiation and individual agency. You've spent a lot of your career studying women and negotiation. What got you started in that area, and why did you choose negotiation specifically as a topic where you wanted to focus?

Hannah Riley Bowles: That’s a great question. I got caught up in negotiation a very long time ago, because I was interested in how people solve problems, including grand scale problems. So my first work in the negotiation field was with Roger Fisher, God rest his soul, who's now passed away. He wrote the book, “Getting to Yes,” but he was doing work with the folks on both sides of the South African conflict. He was doing a lot of work in Central America. He was doing work really all around the world, helping people develop their conflict management, negotiation, and problem-solving competencies. And he would work with people on both sides. 

And so that’s where I got kind of caught up in this initially was just this importance of enhancing people's capacity to solve problems together. And I ended up honestly got caught up in the gender thing because I was over doing my doctoral work at Harvard Business School and Linda Babcock was there. She was interested in women don't ask, and I was kind of like, I don’t believe this, these women at Harvard Business School, they’re so fierce. Look at them. They’re so competent. Like, how can this be, you know? And then we were finding effects when we went and looked at the classroom exercises and a variety of other places. And so what got me into this was saying, why would this happen?

And so what that spawned was a whole bunch of research looking at the conditions under which you get gender effects. So one of the things that came out of my dissertation was actually just looking at whether you’re negotiating for yourself or for somebody else. Which is one that I still love and there's been a lot of research subsequently and even meta-analysis showing these effects. But basically, it's a really nice example where it shows that it's not about women as negotiators. So our first studies, we just simply ran pay negotiation, and we said you're either negotiating for yourself or you're negotiating for somebody else. In the early studies, we ran them with young people, and then we ran them with executives. And particularly with executives, one consistent finding that we had was that women were more assertive negotiating the pay of others than their own pay. Right? So they were coming out with better outcomes when they were advocating for others. We didn't get any real effects around self versus other for men. But for the female executives in particular, they were killing it. They got the best outcomes of anybody when you said, “Go in there and get this person better compensation.”

The point is, it’s not about the person, it’s about the context, and research has shown, subsequently, my research and others, has shown that, particularly within western cultures, that we idealize women putting others before themselves. And so, the idea of making claim and then making claim to money in particular—I think it’s a status linked resource. It’s associated with the male breadwinner, even if that doesn’t really reflect the structure of families, the majority of certainly U.S. families anymore. But it’s this masculine, stereotypic, power-status-linked resource and you're individually competing for more of it for yourself. And so what we’ve shown is that, and others have shown, is that women are more likely to encounter resistance when they’re advocating for themselves than for others, particularly around things like pay. And resistance in the form of “I don't really know if I want to work with this woman” or resistance in the form of people breaking off a deal or not giving people what they’re asking for.

So if I could go back to the leadership stuff, we now have decades of research on gender and negotiation, showing these two basic situational factors. One is the degree of ambiguity: Do people understand what they’re supposed to be doing? Do they have objective criteria and clear instructions? And then the degree of the perceived relevance and salience of gender within the situation. Those two factors have really important influence on whether you're going to get gender results. 

So, going back to the relevance and salience, for instance, there’s this one terrific study where they ran a competitive bargaining negotiation over motorcycle headlamps and you're an automobile executive. Competitive negotiation, very masculine, stereotypically. Now they switch it so that it’s the same negotiation economically, the underlying structure is the same. But they say you’re negotiating for lamp beads for jewelry rather than headlamps and all of a sudden, the gender effects go away because you’re not like pretending to take on this role. I think the average guy in a negotiation class knows as little about being an automobile executive as does the average woman in the class. But there is this way of inhabiting a kind of stereotypical space. It's just easier if it belongs to roles that you’ve played in your life. 

But then if you give people clear information about what they’re supposed to be negotiating, doesn’t matter if they’re being automobile executives or it doesn’t matter if they're negotiating lamp beads, you’re really not going to get the effects. And so we had taken those decades of research on gender and negotiation illuminating these two really important contextual factors, and then we said, wow, would this also show up in the literature on leadership? Would it also show up on the literature on risk taking? And so in this recent review that we published in Perspectives on Psychological Science, we showed that there’s a remarkable parallelism across these different domains of the importance of attending to ambiguity and the importance of attending to the relevance and salience of gender or other identities in context. You know, there are other identities that may be more salient. 

But then let’s take this back to like this type of stuff that Iris is doing. We can then look at these patterns and then say: Okay, what does that mean for the individual advice that we give? What does that mean for the advice we give to managers? What does that mean for the advice that we would give in terms of organizational design or practices? 

Ralph Ranalli: You said that the truth is more nuanced about how women are quote unquote doing in terms of leadership positions. There are places where women are actually killing it. And then there are places where they’re maybe underrepresented. 

Hannah Riley Bowles: So there are spaces like certainly the NGO sector—women dominate in the NGO sector—certainly in the healthcare sector, you're seeing women highly prominent in education sectors. Look at like, university presidents. I mean, there are lots of spaces where… In government. There’s a lot of spaces where you see a lot of women’s leadership. So let's talk about the historic masculine stereotypicality. Less in some domains than in others, but then there are industries that are like particular industries where they've just been historically male dominated. If you look at things like transportation, energy, infrastructure, technology. 

So what I think is really important again let's go back to our women, good negotiators, right? It’s like, well, wait a minute. If all I do is switch whether you're negotiating for yourself or somebody else and I can get different effects, we don’t really have good things to say about globally what women are like as negotiators, right? Similarly, I don’t think we have a lot globally to say about women as leaders, although I can share with you one effect that seems remarkably robust. We need to celebrate the places where women are thriving and leading in really important ways and point to those and then also look at those areas where, and ask the question, well, why aren’t they there? We know they’re very effective and we’re actually seeing them even in those places where they’re less well represented playing very important and value creating roles. What are the barriers in those spaces? Now, some people, if I point to the nonprofit sector, I’ll get an eye roll from some people like, well, that's not where the money is. That’s not where the power is. Okay. That's really interesting. Okay. So why is that a barrier? You know, it's not about leadership competence, so what are we learning from that about how we break open some of these spaces?

Ralph Ranalli: Well, that’s interesting because about 12 years ago, you interviewed 50 top female leaders about their paths to attaining leadership positions. And I think you came up with this dual path theory where one was called navigating and the other was called pioneering and pioneering sounds a lot like you what you were just talking about where your efforts were not aimed at moving through the social hierarchy but emphasizing leadership that was recognized to serve the collective good. Can you talk a little bit about what you’ve learned about those two paths? 

Hannah Riley Bowles: Thank you so much. I’m going to concede upfront that I worked later with a doctoral student who came up with better labels than navigating and pioneering. She calls them gold star versus North Star, which I thought was so great and fit very much with the research. So navigators, which are like the gold stars, is this idea that you're working your way through the existing system and you’re saying, I have achieved all of those things that are required. So you interview this executive, and she’ll say to you, I have cross-functional team experience. I have international experience. I've done X, Y, Z. That is why I’m qualified for this job. 

And then the people who were more pioneering—North Stars—what they were doing was telling a story into which people were buying. And actually a wonderful example that I use in that article is Margaret Thatcher. So in Margaret Thatcher’s autobiography, she basically explains why she could never, in the beginning, early on, she explains, I could never lead the party because I've never held this role and I’ve never held that role and a woman has never held any of these important roles that are required in order to be the leader of the party. But what actually she did was she just said, I just care so much about my party, I’m going to get on my soapbox and I’m going to get anybody to listen to me who’s willing, and I’m going to tell you where I think my party needs to go. And it was through that vision, that North Star, her vision of where things needed to go. 

The other thing about the Gold Stars or the Navigators is that they’re really trying to persuade gatekeepers, will you let me up this next level? You know, can I get on the chutes and ladders? Where the North Star people are these pioneers, they were getting like 360-degree support, you know? So another example was an entrepreneur who discovered whole foods early on and was a path breaker in the sale of whole foods. And she just said I turned my first stores into a laboratory and I would educate my clients, and then I would educate investors. So it was all about: "Can I persuade you of why this vision is so important and why everybody should buy into it? 

Going back to this gender thing, I think particularly when you are in a historically male dominated, masculine, stereotypically entrenched space, it is harder for women to do that chutes and ladders thing. Right? Because I haven’t done those things that you’re going to require of me. Even though I really could be helpful to you right now leading this organization, right? 

Ralph Ranalli: Right. Or even if you do have those qualifications, you have implicit biases that are going to handicap you if you are up against a equally qualified male candidate. 

Hannah Riley Bowles: Right. You don’t look like what we usually invest in around here. And so the people who are doing this, they’re like breaking the frame. Can I go back to the negotiation stuff though? So, while I early on was working on what are those contextual factors that influence whether we get gender effects, my more recent research is focused on how women use negotiation to change contexts. And one really important thing that we found when we went out and we looked at what are early career, mid-career, senior executives negotiating to advance their careers. 

One thing that we found, which came out after blind coding—we really weren’t expecting it going in—was that women did more of what was called bending negotiations than men. And that was saying that the chutes and ladders path or like the typical things that are offered, that's not really fitting for me. And I’d like to do something different. So one way in which they were using this was to deal with work and family. So they were rising up into levels of an organization where you hadn’t had people with substantial caregiving responsibilities. And they were saying things like: “My dad is really sick. He's in another state. I can do this job, but I need one week a month. I’m going to be closer to my dad or my parents.”

But the other thing that they did, which was fascinating, going back to your example, was they were saying: “You know, you've always had an engineer in this job. I don’t have an engineering degree, but I don't know how much they’re using their engineering degrees. I know this operation, I have a strategic vision.”  And they were negotiating alternative career paths, breaking those historic frames in the organization. And in ways that, yes, that were about their career advancement, but were also breaking open paths, like if we go back to our Madeleine Albright example, breaking open paths for other people to come up through and take alternative paths in the organization. Frame breakers and their individual agency in breaking those frames and pioneering new paths are really important.

And maybe that goes back to our beginning question: How should we be changing the narratives? Let’s celebrate the extraordinary degree to which women have broken paths and are contributing. And yes, the boulders are there and the gremlins are hiding and we’ve got to deal with some pretty important stuff. But we’ve got to be able to hold both of those things at the same time to retain the energy and resilience and inspire the next generation to pursue these roles. 

Ralph Ranalli: Yeah, it’s fairly meta to think that changing the overall narrative seems to require changing individual narratives, going from Gold Star to North Star. You work on your own narrative, and you create your own story, as opposed to trying to be a character in the institutional story.

Hannah Riley Bowles: If the old story doesn’t include you in it, you have to write your new story. I’m actually doing more work now with diverse young people from historically marginalized, backgrounds. And they are not only negotiating with employers to do things different, they're negotiating with their parents to say, “I don't want to get married yet,” or, “I’m going to move independently to another city to work or to study,” in ways that are unfathomable to the traditional narrative. And I think we need to celebrate their courage and the importance of their agency in making change. 

Ralph Ranalli: Can we talk about men for just a second before we wrap up? Because you did a study that talked about a growing attention to the importance of factoring men’s experience into increasing diversity, equity, and inclusion. I believe it used MBA students, and it demonstrated that if men received affirmation, it decreased their anxiety and increased their openness to what you were calling displays of dominance by women. And you also wrote a book about engaged fatherhood. So I don’t know if there’s a way to tie those two things together, but they both seem to fascinatingly flip the page over to the other side.  

Hannah Riley Bowles: I love that. And I’m so appreciative you said that... So let me name a few ways in which I think it’s really important to bring men into these conversations. One is that a lot of the effect that we’ve documented in relation to gender are really more about power and status, right? So, you and I actually originally started this conversation because you were looking at that review that we recently published showing the remarkable parallels between the psychological experience of power and the gender effects associated with being male versus female. So some of these effects that we've historically associated with gender—and this is a long-time feminist argument too but now we have more psychological science behind it—are really just about power. 

So if you just talk about effects of men and women, and then you don’t think about those power dynamics, you're in essence disappearing the experience of men from historically marginalized groups. So for instance, Black men in the United States, East Asian men face very similar barriers, gay white men versus straight white men face many of the similar barriers in negotiation that’s now been documented that were traditionally associated with quote unquote women, right? And so these intersecting characteristics are really important. So if you don’t bring men, if you don’t bring intersectional perspectives and diverse men into the picture, you’re really just talking about white privileged men and women. And that’s obviously a mistake. 

A second way in which the gender research is bringing in men, which relates to the study, that you were referencing, but I’m going to try to connect it to a larger body of work, is showing that there are ways, and we've looked for so long at ways in which women fall into gender traps. And now there's growing research about traps that men fall into, and particularly in situations where they feel threatened. And there’s a growing number of studies now showing that if you expose men to a threat, maybe particularly an identity threat or a masculinity threat, that they then don’t act like their best selves either, right? So they may end up being likely to engage in conflict, or they would make a lower quality decision than they might make if they were not experiencing that threat. So that particular study was looking at basically like affirmation as a kind of inoculation to threat manipulation.

I think actually, one of the most stable effects—looking at the ways in which men and women lead—is that women are more participatory, more democratic leaders across a lot of contexts than men are typically. But I also wonder, and this is not demonstrated, about the degree to which we should be paying attention to threats to men's masculinity and power. There is some evidence on this—whether the authoritarianism could be a trap for men—because when women are coming out evaluated higher than men it tends to be associated with these, more participatory and democratic leadership practices. So maybe that's a trap we should think about. 

But then on the fatherhood, I’m so glad you raised this because, if we’re striving for gender equality, which I want to clarify, is about equality of opportunity. And we’ve never run that experiment. We may still end up with more men in leadership roles and more women doing primary caregiving roles. We don’t know that. But, for gender equality of giving people opportunity of choice, we need to be looking at unpaid as well as paid labor, right? 

So number one, we were talking about the gender gap in authority positions. You're not going to really address that by piling paid labor on top of unpaid labor for women. That's an obvious barrier and constraint. I think what’s also really important is that there is, in this book on engaged fatherhood, it's engaged fatherhood for men, for families and for gender equality. And we got to collaborate, and I'm continuing to collaborate with these mostly men who study fatherhood from a men's perspective and the importance for men of getting invited into that space, the importance for their identities, for their mental health, for their social wellbeing and just kind of life gratification. And I think you particularly hear. From young men, I know you hear this at the Kennedy School, that they want to actually be engaged fathers. They want to be engaged in families. 

And so, I’m grateful to be part of this growing group of scholars, and then also folks in practice who are saying, listen, this is not just about women and women’s problems. This is about giving everybody better opportunities and thinking about the frames that we’re using in unpaid as well as paid labor. And so, thank you for bringing that in, because if we’re leaving men out of the picture, we're really constrained in the progress that we’re going to make for everyone.

Ralph Ranalli: Right. So, we need to wrap up, but this being PolicyCast, we have to end with policy. So, if you had your moment where they said, Hannah, you’re in charge. Give us some policy ideas that would help create more and better female leaders. What would your recommendations be? What are some concrete things that we could do?

Hannah Riley Bowles: Well, it’s hard to separate women’s leadership from, women’s, workforce participation more broadly and the structure of society. I honestly think that more family friendly policies that are more engaging of men are extremely important. So, actually, if you look at Claudia Golden who just won the Nobel for her historic work looking at gender inequality over time, and she mostly looks at college educated women, so she actually looks at a lot of these women who would be very good candidates for leadership roles. And what she emphasizes is that where the gaps really occur is in time greedy labor. Leadership roles are very often time greedy. And one of the reasons why we look to men for time greedy work is because we associate caregiving with women and not with men. And to the extent that we can break down those assumptions and invite everybody into unpaid care work as well as paid labor and the work of building our society and communities. I think that's, if I had to choose one thing, I think that’s where I would focus.  

Another thing that I think is very important, which I’ve been writing about lately, and this is more of an organizational thing than a national thing, but we over focus on pay when we talk about negotiation. And if you look at the gender pay gap, it's really better explained by the, the types of jobs that men and women are in than it is by discrimination for the same work and role. And so, if all we cared about is the gender pay gap, what we want to do is get women into better paying jobs. And you want to think about negotiating your career paths and the roles that you're in, rather than just about the money that you're getting in the particular role that you're in. So from an organizational perspective, I think what you see are policies that make sure that it is transparent, not only pay standards, but the broader range of resources. And again people may lean forward and tell women what the family-friendly opportunities and tell men are what are some of these other types of opportunities that they think they might want. I think that we really need to standardize the type of information that is made available. It doesn't mean that everybody gets the same deal, but everybody should understand what are those options. 

I think the other thing that’s happened in terms of policy that’s very useful is that organizations have been asked to report their gender pay gaps. And they report them at the organization level and it’s not exactly a nonsense number. It's not that insightful in itself, because again, it’s mostly explained by the jobs that men and women are in. But what's happened from that, even though it's kind of a gross number, organizations are then motivated to say, “Well, wait a minute, wait a minute, it’s 80 percent because we have a ton of women and they’re paid the same as men in the jobs that they’re in.” But then all of a sudden what they realize is, “Geez, if we were going to correct that, we need to get a bunch of women higher up.” So I think reporting at an organizational level those kinds of things. Not in a punitive way, but in a way kind of like: “Okay, can we now then look at why is that what's going on there?” I think that's very important. Transparency. Inclusiveness. 

Ralph Ranalli: Well, Hannah this has been a really enjoyable and interesting conversation, and I can’t wait to see what happens, both in the near-term future and in the longer term future with women in leadership. I appreciate your work, and you taking the time to be here.

Hannah Riley Bowles: Well, thank you. I think there’s a lot of reason for optimism, and we need to keep shining that light. Thanks for having me. Really appreciate it.

Outro (Ralph Ranalli): Thanks for listening. If you haven’t already, please subscribe to PolicyCast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcasting app. We’ll be back with another episode soon, talking about solutions to the housing crisis with ����vlog���� Professor Justin de Benedictis-Kessner and former Burlington Vermont mayor Miro Wienberger. So until then, remember to speak bravely, and listen generously.