Where and why do women lead? The importance of leadership for private profit versus purpose beyond profit

Abstract

To examine how personal preferences and social norms can influence women's occupancy of organizational leadership roles, this research compared leadership roles that differ in their stakeholder focus on private profit (PP), producing gains for shareholders, or on purpose beyond profit (PBP), producing gains for the community and society. Consistent with the greater representation of women leaders in non-profit than for-profit sectors, the research showed that men preferred and were expected to prefer leader roles focussed on PP and women preferred and were expected to prefer leader roles focussed on PBP. These differing preferences and normative expectations reflected divergent life goals, whereby men favoured agentic goals and women favoured communal goals, with social norms reflecting this gender difference. This research thus showed how the communal and agentic life goals of women and men are linked to their personal role preferences and to normative expectations about leader role occupancy, thus fostering gender segregated leader roles.