Gender, Interaction, and Leadership

This article describes research on gender and processes of power and prestige in task groups. We depart from standard analyses and use a measure of opinion change to describe leadership on power and prestige orders. We use data from laboratory studies of single-gender and mixed-gender groups to test gender-role socialization, status characteristic, and legitimation arguments. We find that all-female and all-male groups are eqully likely to develop power and prestige orders. Among initially leaderless, mixed-gender groups, males are five times more likely than females to exercise opinion leadership. Gender differences vanish, however, when we make a pretask assignmetn of leaders to mixed-gender groups. These findings are most consistent with status characteristic and legitimation theories, which correctly predict the outcomes of three out of four studies. Gender-role arguments predict only one outcome out of four. Finally, our analyses of sociometric data provide evidence of gender bias in peer evaluations of female and male members of mixed-gender groups. We conclude by discussing the implicatyions of our research for additional work on gender and leadership processes.