Business Insights: Global Markets, Strategy & Economic Trends
- Harvard Business Review systematically examined perceptions of women in executive roles across multiple decades.
- Researchers used nearly identical survey questions to enable precise comparisons of attitudes over time.
- The work compares how men and women experience leadership and workplace perceptions.
- Repeated studies offer longitudinal insight into changing attitudes and organizational dynamics.
- These findings encourage rethinking of leadership norms, compensation, and organizational practices to address bias.
In 1965, an article published in Harvard Business Review asked the question: “Are Women Executives People?” The title was deliberately provocative, and the moment warranted provocation: of the 2,000 male and female executives surveyed for the article, a substantially large proportion of male executives viewed women in management unfavorably, not because of their competency to lead but because they felt the executive suite was an inappropriate place for them. Since then, work published in HBR has examined perceptions of women in executive roles at twenty-year intervals, with author teams using nearly identical questions from the 1965 research in both 1985’s “Compensation, Jobs, and Gender,” by Benson Rosen, Sara Rynes, and Thomas A. Mahoney and 2006’s “What Men Think They Know About Executive Women.”
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