THE WALL STREET WOMEN
Business management styles differ noticeably between genders, but Linda Krefting, Ph.D., believes that the mass media perpetuates equivocal images of women executives.
Written by Leslie Woodard
Business management styles differ noticeably between genders, but one Texas Tech University researcher believes that the mass media perpetuates negative perceptions of female managers, or at the very least, makes being a female manager an issue in the workplace at all.
"The issue is awareness of how women are portrayed, and how that impacts what we expect to see of women," said Linda Krefting, Ph.D., associate professor of management in Texas Tech’s College of Business Administration. "What press coverage does is create’ what people already know, or contributes to what they think they know, and that, over time, colors what people perceive and how they react to what they read." According to Krefting, the world’s most respected business publication goes far in promoting stereotypes of women in business. Krefting has done an extensive study of the coverage of women in the Wall Street Journal.
"There is ambivalence in perceptions about women executives," said Krefting. "One study I’ve read states it this way: Women experience a double-bind on perceived competence; either it is questioned, or it is acknowledged, but at the cost of losing likeability and influence.’ That perception creates problems. While we have documented perceptions, and we continue to document the disjuncture between women and executive work, we haven’t really asked the questions where do these perceptions come from? How do they arrive, how do they get reproduced?’ These are unusual questions to ask in management."
Krefting points to two startling realities as proof that perpetuation of negative perceptions exists: the persistence of the glass ceiling for women executives and the stagnant enrollment of women in elite Master of Business Administration (MBA) programs.
"Over the last decade, enrollment of women in law schools and medical schools, even in the elite programs, has increased more than 40 percent, and it has been stuck at 30 percent for MBA programs. So part of the argument about the glass ceiling is that there is an inadequate pipeline, if you have stagnant enrollment in the best programs."
Krefting says a whole set of issues that gets raised about both of those problems are the perceptions of women executives, and that those perceptions play a role in limiting their advancement to the top and limiting the willingness of women to enroll in MBA programs.
From a study published in 1998, Krefting offered the following results of a survey of college students who were asked to choose descriptors of successful middle managers in general, successful female middle managers and successful male middle managers.
"There was reasonably consistent agreement describing successful middle managers and male middle managers, but when it came to describing successful female middle managers, there was a real split between how female students described them, and how male students described them. Not only that but they were nearly all polar, positive versus negative descriptions."
Some of the descriptors chosen by male college students included: bitter, dawdle and procrastinate, deceitful, frivolous, hasty, nervous, passive, quarrelsome, reserved, uncertain and vulgar.
Descriptors chosen by female students to describe female middle managers included: ambitious, assertive, competent, creative, direct, emotionally stable, firm, helpful, objective, prompt, sophisticated and tactful.
"I’ve been interested in figuring out where these perceptions come from, because if these perceptions are those of current college students, it’s not because they have extensive experience with middle managers, male or female. The perceptions have to be coming from somewhere. Media is at least one of the possibilities."
Several sections of the WSJ fell under Krefting’s scrutiny. She looked at the coverage of the deaths of Princess Diana and of Mother Teresa, the WSJ op-ed pages from July to December 1997, the WSJ front pages from July 1999 to July 2000 and the WSJ cartoon portfolios featuring panels from the 1950s through the 1990s. Much of her study surveyed articles for representations of women executives in the year following the appointment of Carly Fiorina as the head of Hewlett-Packard. In the year following Fiorina’s appointment, the WSJ ran no less than 40 stories on various women executives.
The headline on the initial Fiorina article read, "In This Family, She’s the CEO and He’s Home." Krefting explains that while the article highlighted Fiorina’s management skills and expertise, it also undermined the manner in which Fiorina got to where she was. The article further stated that Fiorina "declined to discuss her husband’s role. And many businesswomen believe it is sexist to focus on her lifestyle choices, as opposed to what she accomplished at AT&T and Lucent."
"The attributions we make about people who are successful by accident are much different than the attributions we make about the people who actively climb the corporate ladder," Krefting said.
"The Wall Street Journal actually has more to do with what’s framing the real issues out there than any other publication because of its circulation," Krefting said. From her research Krefting concluded that media, the Wall Street Journal in particular sends a strong message. "We often tell
women that they should value their differences, but then when it comes down to holding them accountable, those differences are looked at negatively," Krefting said.
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