Description of the video:

SCARPINO: In the 1980s, you were a social psychologist with a tremendous reputation in the study of attitudes and gender and sex roles. From doing some reading and talking to some of your colleagues, psychologists who studied leadership were more likely to be working in industrial or organizational psychology than social psychology.

EAGLY: Right.

SCARPINO: When you began to move your own research agenda in the direction of leadership, did you get any pushback from colleagues who worked in other areas. . .

EAGLY: . . . Not really.

SCARPINO: . . . saying, “What are you doing here stepping on my toes?” or anything like that?

EAGLY: Actually not. The first of those meta-analytic projects was on leadership style, and leadership style was somewhat—a lot declining in industrial organizational psychology because the classic ways of looking at leadership style had been critiqued quite a lot, so we were actually looking at that classic literature. So for them, it was “Oh, yeah.” They weren’t too excited because there was quite a lot of critique of those kinds of measures, but yet the findings were quite interesting that we came out with. I sort of only gradually became associated with what we call I-O psychology, industrial-organizational. I didn’t march in and say, “Here I am.” But I was then a few times invited to one of their conferences to be part of a panel. At first I thought, “should I go there, why do I want go there?” I remember one of my colleagues who was an I-O said, “Well, Alice, the people who study leadership are in I-O, why wouldn’t you go?” And I thought, “That’s true. I will go.” So then I went and they were very nice. They seemed quite welcoming and eventually I joined their division of the American Psychological Association, their society, and then I became a fellow of their society eventually. Then they even gave me a prize a few years ago, so I found them open-minded and welcoming.

SCARPINO: In 1990, while you were still at Purdue, you published “Gender and Leadership Style: A Meta-analysis” that appeared in Psychological Bulletin, co-author Blair Johnson, and this was one of the four areas that you identified with that National Science Foundation grant. Why did you begin your examination of leadership with a meta-analysis?

EAGLY: Because that was one of the questions that people disagreed about. It was so interesting that the scientists, and they were in industrial organizational psychology, were saying there is no difference in leadership, “There is no sex difference. We know that.” And they would cite a few studies, you know, “Maybe I’ll cite three or four studies” that didn’t get any difference. Then there popular writers who were mainly like management consultants, people who were out there in the trenches, women, who were writing these books about the female style. They sold a lot of books, as a matter of fact. They had sort of been there and they had all these qualitative stories to tell and examples that were quite compelling in a way. Then the experts said that’s ridiculous, but they would cite three or four studies. That was ridiculous because I had the sense there were probably hundreds of studies. So that was the idea to actually go out and find the studies. Just to say there’s no difference based on the citing of three or four studies is not responsible in a scientific sense. I thought the answer would be more complex than either story—either the trade books or the scientists. It was sort of politically correct to say there’s no sex difference, so the scientists were saying that. In some circles, it was politically correct, at any rate. It struck me as ever so intriguing to actually find the studies and see whether there were differences.

SCARPINO: And were there?

EAGLY: Mildly so. The biggest one was the stereotypic one, which the trade writers were talking about, that women were more participative and collaborative. Then the others, that men might be more task-oriented or instrumental leadership and women were more people-oriented in some sense, that was the other part that you could look at in terms of lots of literature. That was less true when you moved into real managerial roles as opposed to more lab studies where you took students. There we argued the managerial role was pretty powerful to get you to do it a certain way. You probably have to do both of those things as a manager, but that the participatory part is a little more discretionary.

SCARPINO: When you did the meta-analysis, did you find anything in the way of what you considered to be fundamental differences?

EAGLY: Well. . .

SCARPINO: Or did you identify differences in which while a woman may be more inclined in a particular direction but some men did that, too. . .

EAGLY: . . . Oh sure.

SCARPINO: And that men were inclined in a direction, but some women did that, too?

EAGLY: Sure. Right. Virtually all psychological sex differences are that way. There are overlapping distributions. But nonetheless, you may find average differences and those average differences tend to be represented stereotypically. It was pretty interesting because we got these relatively modest differences. But the one that was overriding the different context was this participative directive; men more top-down, women more collaborative. Is it fundamental? That’s difficult to say. It depends on how you interpret it. It may be that women are kind of forced into it because they’re often not as welcome as leaders, and so the way to make people comfortable is to give them some counter power in the situation and talk to them and form bonds with them to win their confidence in a sense. The interpretation is not inherent in the phenomenon. But we did see something there, yeah.

SCARPINO: So once you know that, what does that say for women who want to become leaders or programs that train leaders?

EAGLY: Well, it’s a little complicated. We also found out that when you go to extremely male-dominated environments, like the military, that that tends to be less so that women are collaborative. It’s probably because there’s one way, the military way, thank you very much.

SCARPINO: That was my experience.

EAGLY: Yeah, and it’s the mode, that you’re the officer and people don’t question your authority. And so even for the women that may have been true. I think that in view of other things that we know now about backlash that, in fact, it should be recommended to women that they are authoritative but collaborative because it may make people more comfortable with their authority and they may indeed have to win them over in a sense. That’s not true in all settings, but to say that we do see this difference and that other information suggests that it may be more effective for women to add those qualities to their leadership.

SCARPINO: I understand from your co-author, Blair Johnson, that the two of you discovered that the amount of work required to carry out the meta-analysis was much larger than you originally anticipated.

EAGLY: Yeah, and he produced a computer program that did the calculations, the first such program, and that was an immense help to us.

SCARPINO: He said that when you applied for renewal of the National Science Foundation grant that you really didn’t have much to show for it, and yet, NSF renewed.

EAGLY: Yeah.

SCARPINO: What did that tell you about the research path you were on, that you were able to get that renewal?

EAGLY: They do take a long time.

SCARPINO: The fact that they were willing to renew without much in the way of. . .

EAGLY: . . .publication. There was no publication yet, I guess. Yeah, that was good.

SCARPINO: I will note that “Gender and Leadership Style” has demonstrated significant ongoing staying power. It has been reprinted five different times between 1992 and 2004.

EAGLY: Yes.

SCARPINO: It ranks fourth on your citation index. It’s really been amazing.

EAGLY: Yeah. It has been successful in that way.

SCARPINO: Blair Johnson earned his Ph.D. from Purdue in 1988 and he is presently a professor of psychology at the University of Connecticut.

EAGLY: Right.

SCARPINO: This, I think, is another example of you launching the career, or helping to launch the career, of one of your students.

EAGLY: Yeah. He’s done great. He is very productive.

SCARPINO: He had a very charming thing to say about this article. It’s number one on his citation index, so I asked him about it.

EAGLY: It is. I’ve seen that.

SCARPINO: He said that “‘Gender and Leadership’ is like money in the bank. It keeps on making interest.” (Laughing)

EAGLY: (Laughing) Right. That’s true.

SCARPINO: I will also add that he told me that your mentoring of him really put him in a position to have a satisfying career and that he feels as though every time he helps one of his students he is paying you back.

EAGLY: Oh, that’s nice. That’s really very nice.

SCARPINO: I asked for his permission to pass that along.

EAGLY: He has been very successful, and he was a very, very good graduate student.

SCARPINO: You then published a meta-analysis of each of the other three areas.

EAGLY: Yes, yes, eventually. It took quite a while to get all four of them out.

SCARPINO: I wanted to see if I could switch from leadership style to access to leadership. You have written about what people call the “glass ceiling”—I don’t know if that’s a scientific term, but it’s one that’s descriptive—and have argued that this is not a good description of the situation women face as they seek to move up the career ladder. You have described the glass ceiling as a metaphor as being, and I am quoting you, “profoundly misleading,” because it fails to capture the phenomenon of women’s actual careers.

EAGLY: Right.

SCARPINO: Thinking in terms of access to leadership, can you explain why the glass ceiling metaphor is profoundly misleading?

EAGLY: It suggests there are absolute barriers, you know, that it’s very, very difficult to get beyond, and that’s not the case. There are challenges, but they’re more permeable than would be suggested by the notion of a firm barrier. But that it’s the same for women as men is not the case. So the notion of a labyrinth, you know, men might have more of a straight road and that women might have more challenges of various sorts, which maybe with thought and a bit of luck and perseverance, can be overcome so that women can move to their career goals successfully. It’s a more accurate metaphor because we have women—we haven’t had a female president—but we have secretaries of state and we have some CEOs in Fortune 500, but many women leading many organizations. So it isn’t as if it’s not possible; it certainly is. Furthermore, the glass ceiling to me—and it’s just a metaphor so they’re ambiguous—but that women don’t see it until they hit their heads on it or something, but that implies they don’t understand the phenomena and I think women are able to understand that there are challenges that they face, so it’s sort of a know-nothing metaphor, too.

SCARPINO: Again, looking back over your long career as a scholar, do you see the culture of access to leadership changing in a positive direction?

EAGLY: Yes, somewhat. We do see, over time, more women in leadership roles for sure. It’s slow progress, as in the Congress, but it nevertheless is moving upward in most all leadership roles. So is the culture changing? Yes, and that’s one of my later projects, another meta-analysis, on the leader stereotype. We have a way of thinking about leadership and so leaders should epitomize it. That is culturally masculine that leaders take charge and are assertive and know what they’re doing and tell people what to do. But we showed across three different types of research, three different research paradigms, that that image of leadership is gravitated toward androgyny. It’s still masculine, but it’s not so extremely so. People are now expecting leadership to embody more social skills, interpersonal skills of working closely with people and bringing them onboard, and that leaders are supposed to encourage followers and motivate them and be more teachers and coaches of them rather than just telling them what to do and scolding them when they’re not doing it or something. That has changed in the culture in many contexts so it’s less extremely masculine.

SCARPINO: If the culture of leadership is a little bit more androgenous than it was, is that because women who want to become leaders are acting more like stereotypical men, or because there has been give on both sides and we are redefining what it takes to be a leader?

EAGLY: That’s an interesting question because we don’t entirely know why it has changed. Your typical organizational theorists give an explanation that has nothing to do with gender. It’s the nature of organizations, that organizations are flatter structures where leaders are not just up here sort of determining things. It’s very complex instead. If you think of building cars or something, you have all kinds of different expertise brought together. It’s very international. It’s very complex. So the leader, or the CEO, has to be so engaged in so many ways to do a good job that it does take a lot of social skill as well as other kinds of skills. And then a lot of organizations are pretty flat, so people have to engage other people pretty directly even though there are managers and vice presidents or whatever. Your typical organizational expert says that. Then you could say “Well, we have so many more women. Thirty-nine percent of all managers are now women in the U.S., and that maybe women did it differently and that redefined leadership.” And that may be true to some extent, but I don’t know of any proof of that. That women have to do it like men is a misconception that some women have because we know that if women act like men, nobody likes them, and they get into all kinds of trouble with people. So, that’s not typically the phenomenon. Most women are pretty smart and they learn that if they operate in a more androgenous repertoire that they can be more successful. They shouldn’t be super-feminine. That doesn’t usually work because that’s seen as weak, but they’re kind of, I think, pushed into a more androgenous behavioral repertoire because people react to them better. That would redefine leadership, right, if they’re doing that? So there may be some of that, but we don’t have the kind of research that has sorted that out. It would be a difficult question to address empirically, I think.

SCARPINO: In 2007, you co-published with Linda Carli a book titled Through the Labyrinth: The Truth About How Women Become Leaders, which I would describe, I guess, as more for a general readership than most of your previous work?

EAGLY: Yes, that’s how we wrote it.

SCARPINO: It was published in the Leadership for Common Good series of the Center for Public Leadership of the John F. Kennedy School of Government of Harvard University. . .

EAGLY: Yes.

SCARPINO: . . .and, of course, Harvard has the MBA program there. What made you decide to do that?

EAGLY: I felt. . .

SCARPINO: It sort of breaks the mold of what was done for ages?

EAGLY: . . .I felt there was all that work on leadership and there was a huge amount of public interest, and so to bring it together and make it accessible. It’s kind of a crossover book rather than truly a trade book because most of the trade books on leadership are very qualitative. They’re full of examples and experiences. We wanted to make the research accessible because we think it’s very informative. So we did. I think it’s moderately successful. It sold pretty well. But it’s not a big-time trade book.

SCARPINO: So you don’t have a yacht called the Labyrinth or anything?

EAGLY: No, we don’t. It sold about 17,000 copies. It is widely used in courses, too. Say people have a course on gender and leadership or even a course on leadership; these leadership programs or sometimes in business schools or undergraduate courses. It’s academic enough that professors would take it who are concerned that students know that there’s research. But then it’s read out there some by managers and other people.

SCARPINO: We might imagine for a moment that somebody will read this transcript or listen to this recording who is not familiar with your body of work and maybe has not read this book, so could you explain what the labyrinth represents?

EAGLY: It does represent women’s careers in a sense, and the challenges. So the book does explain the challenges. We do have chapters on like the work-family issues, the work-life issues as part of the challenges and then the whole business about the stereotyping and how that affects how people react to women and the backlash phenomenon and then the leadership style piece; how women and men do it and whether it makes a difference. We explain all these challenges that make up the labyrinth, and we use it to some extent as an integrating device. We refer to the labyrinth, “Well, here is this challenge” and “Well, that’s just part of the labyrinth.” It helped us to have a way of integrating the pieces of the book. I hope it helps people in their understanding because I think metaphors are important because they give people something to grasp mentally. Then they can add other phenomena to it in their thinking. That’s not unreasonable that there is that backlash, given that the whole thing is a labyrinth anyway, that women do have these challenges. Yeah, I thought it was helpful.

SCARPINO: What did you conclude was the truth about how women become leaders?

EAGLY: Oh, well that’s not something you can summarize in a sentence or two.

SCARPINO: What would you say are the salient points that might prompt somebody that their next step would be to the library to pick up the book?

EAGLY: Like the work-family issues, a lot of social scientists discuss that; that’s not very distinctive. The distinctive aspects are that we knew a lot about leadership style and a lot about the kind of prejudice aspects and so how that all fits together. Women’s style sort of addresses the potential for prejudice and the conditions under which backlash occurs. To understand this level of phenomena, I think, helps people actually behaviorally; helping people understand the nature of leadership. It does demand directiveness and some degree of assertiveness or whatever. So to help women to understand that probably the androgenous route is their best route and that does not mean acting like a man, but it does not mean crying at work and using some stereotypic soft feminine maneuvers. So to help people understand those things and to anticipate that they may get negative reactions of various sorts and particularly from men in some context. So it’s not some shock. You shouldn’t sort of ignore it. You should understand that it’s there and it’s not because of me as an individual that I’m failing here necessarily, it’s because of the broader phenomenon of gender in society. So to take some of the onus off the individual woman as she understands that the process is broader than herself.

SCARPINO: Do you think that’s important for women to know if they have those aspirations?

EAGLY: I think so, because otherwise if you’re in a situation where there have been few women and you have this leadership role and you sort of don’t have that much legitimacy with some audiences, maybe particularly the men, to understand that that is a situation that’s pretty challenging actually and why is it challenging. Then when you get this backlash or some undermining or whatever, not necessarily to think “Well, I can’t do this; I’m failing here because I’m just not good enough,” it might be that it’s more that you’re a breakthrough woman and this is part of what happens. But hang in there because you’re in a labyrinth and if you stick in the labyrinth, you’re going to get to your goal. That’s the other part; persistence is a labyrinth message. You always get to the center of the labyrinth if you work at it.

Description of the video:

SCARPINO: In the 1980s, you were a social psychologist with a tremendous reputation in the study of attitudes and gender and sex roles. From doing some reading and talking to some of your colleagues, psychologists who studied leadership were more likely to be working in industrial or organizational psychology than social psychology.

EAGLY: Right.

SCARPINO: When you began to move your own research agenda in the direction of leadership, did you get any pushback from colleagues who worked in other areas. . .

EAGLY: . . . Not really.

SCARPINO: . . . saying, “What are you doing here stepping on my toes?” or anything like that?

EAGLY: Actually not. The first of those meta-analytic projects was on leadership style, and leadership style was somewhat—a lot declining in industrial organizational psychology because the classic ways of looking at leadership style had been critiqued quite a lot, so we were actually looking at that classic literature. So for them, it was “Oh, yeah.” They weren’t too excited because there was quite a lot of critique of those kinds of measures, but yet the findings were quite interesting that we came out with. I sort of only gradually became associated with what we call I-O psychology, industrial-organizational. I didn’t march in and say, “Here I am.” But I was then a few times invited to one of their conferences to be part of a panel. At first I thought, “should I go there, why do I want go there?” I remember one of my colleagues who was an I-O said, “Well, Alice, the people who study leadership are in I-O, why wouldn’t you go?” And I thought, “That’s true. I will go.” So then I went and they were very nice. They seemed quite welcoming and eventually I joined their division of the American Psychological Association, their society, and then I became a fellow of their society eventually. Then they even gave me a prize a few years ago, so I found them open-minded and welcoming.

SCARPINO: In 1990, while you were still at Purdue, you published “Gender and Leadership Style: A Meta-analysis” that appeared in Psychological Bulletin, co-author Blair Johnson, and this was one of the four areas that you identified with that National Science Foundation grant. Why did you begin your examination of leadership with a meta-analysis?

EAGLY: Because that was one of the questions that people disagreed about. It was so interesting that the scientists, and they were in industrial organizational psychology, were saying there is no difference in leadership, “There is no sex difference. We know that.” And they would cite a few studies, you know, “Maybe I’ll cite three or four studies” that didn’t get any difference. Then there popular writers who were mainly like management consultants, people who were out there in the trenches, women, who were writing these books about the female style. They sold a lot of books, as a matter of fact. They had sort of been there and they had all these qualitative stories to tell and examples that were quite compelling in a way. Then the experts said that’s ridiculous, but they would cite three or four studies. That was ridiculous because I had the sense there were probably hundreds of studies. So that was the idea to actually go out and find the studies. Just to say there’s no difference based on the citing of three or four studies is not responsible in a scientific sense. I thought the answer would be more complex than either story—either the trade books or the scientists. It was sort of politically correct to say there’s no sex difference, so the scientists were saying that. In some circles, it was politically correct, at any rate. It struck me as ever so intriguing to actually find the studies and see whether there were differences.

SCARPINO: And were there?

EAGLY: Mildly so. The biggest one was the stereotypic one, which the trade writers were talking about, that women were more participative and collaborative. Then the others, that men might be more task-oriented or instrumental leadership and women were more people-oriented in some sense, that was the other part that you could look at in terms of lots of literature. That was less true when you moved into real managerial roles as opposed to more lab studies where you took students. There we argued the managerial role was pretty powerful to get you to do it a certain way. You probably have to do both of those things as a manager, but that the participatory part is a little more discretionary.

SCARPINO: When you did the meta-analysis, did you find anything in the way of what you considered to be fundamental differences?

EAGLY: Well. . .

SCARPINO: Or did you identify differences in which while a woman may be more inclined in a particular direction but some men did that, too. . .

EAGLY: . . . Oh sure.

SCARPINO: And that men were inclined in a direction, but some women did that, too?

EAGLY: Sure. Right. Virtually all psychological sex differences are that way. There are overlapping distributions. But nonetheless, you may find average differences and those average differences tend to be represented stereotypically. It was pretty interesting because we got these relatively modest differences. But the one that was overriding the different context was this participative directive; men more top-down, women more collaborative. Is it fundamental? That’s difficult to say. It depends on how you interpret it. It may be that women are kind of forced into it because they’re often not as welcome as leaders, and so the way to make people comfortable is to give them some counter power in the situation and talk to them and form bonds with them to win their confidence in a sense. The interpretation is not inherent in the phenomenon. But we did see something there, yeah.

SCARPINO: So once you know that, what does that say for women who want to become leaders or programs that train leaders?

EAGLY: Well, it’s a little complicated. We also found out that when you go to extremely male-dominated environments, like the military, that that tends to be less so that women are collaborative. It’s probably because there’s one way, the military way, thank you very much.

SCARPINO: That was my experience.

EAGLY: Yeah, and it’s the mode, that you’re the officer and people don’t question your authority. And so even for the women that may have been true. I think that in view of other things that we know now about backlash that, in fact, it should be recommended to women that they are authoritative but collaborative because it may make people more comfortable with their authority and they may indeed have to win them over in a sense. That’s not true in all settings, but to say that we do see this difference and that other information suggests that it may be more effective for women to add those qualities to their leadership.

SCARPINO: I understand from your co-author, Blair Johnson, that the two of you discovered that the amount of work required to carry out the meta-analysis was much larger than you originally anticipated.

EAGLY: Yeah, and he produced a computer program that did the calculations, the first such program, and that was an immense help to us.

SCARPINO: He said that when you applied for renewal of the National Science Foundation grant that you really didn’t have much to show for it, and yet, NSF renewed.

EAGLY: Yeah.

SCARPINO: What did that tell you about the research path you were on, that you were able to get that renewal?

EAGLY: They do take a long time.

SCARPINO: The fact that they were willing to renew without much in the way of. . .

EAGLY: . . .publication. There was no publication yet, I guess. Yeah, that was good.

SCARPINO: I will note that “Gender and Leadership Style” has demonstrated significant ongoing staying power. It has been reprinted five different times between 1992 and 2004.

EAGLY: Yes.

SCARPINO: It ranks fourth on your citation index. It’s really been amazing.

EAGLY: Yeah. It has been successful in that way.

SCARPINO: Blair Johnson earned his Ph.D. from Purdue in 1988 and he is presently a professor of psychology at the University of Connecticut.

EAGLY: Right.

SCARPINO: This, I think, is another example of you launching the career, or helping to launch the career, of one of your students.

EAGLY: Yeah. He’s done great. He is very productive.

SCARPINO: He had a very charming thing to say about this article. It’s number one on his citation index, so I asked him about it.

EAGLY: It is. I’ve seen that.

SCARPINO: He said that “‘Gender and Leadership’ is like money in the bank. It keeps on making interest.” (Laughing)

EAGLY: (Laughing) Right. That’s true.

SCARPINO: I will also add that he told me that your mentoring of him really put him in a position to have a satisfying career and that he feels as though every time he helps one of his students he is paying you back.

EAGLY: Oh, that’s nice. That’s really very nice.

SCARPINO: I asked for his permission to pass that along.

EAGLY: He has been very successful, and he was a very, very good graduate student.

SCARPINO: You then published a meta-analysis of each of the other three areas.

EAGLY: Yes, yes, eventually. It took quite a while to get all four of them out.

SCARPINO: I wanted to see if I could switch from leadership style to access to leadership. You have written about what people call the “glass ceiling”—I don’t know if that’s a scientific term, but it’s one that’s descriptive—and have argued that this is not a good description of the situation women face as they seek to move up the career ladder. You have described the glass ceiling as a metaphor as being, and I am quoting you, “profoundly misleading,” because it fails to capture the phenomenon of women’s actual careers.

EAGLY: Right.

SCARPINO: Thinking in terms of access to leadership, can you explain why the glass ceiling metaphor is profoundly misleading?

EAGLY: It suggests there are absolute barriers, you know, that it’s very, very difficult to get beyond, and that’s not the case. There are challenges, but they’re more permeable than would be suggested by the notion of a firm barrier. But that it’s the same for women as men is not the case. So the notion of a labyrinth, you know, men might have more of a straight road and that women might have more challenges of various sorts, which maybe with thought and a bit of luck and perseverance, can be overcome so that women can move to their career goals successfully. It’s a more accurate metaphor because we have women—we haven’t had a female president—but we have secretaries of state and we have some CEOs in Fortune 500, but many women leading many organizations. So it isn’t as if it’s not possible; it certainly is. Furthermore, the glass ceiling to me—and it’s just a metaphor so they’re ambiguous—but that women don’t see it until they hit their heads on it or something, but that implies they don’t understand the phenomena and I think women are able to understand that there are challenges that they face, so it’s sort of a know-nothing metaphor, too.

SCARPINO: Again, looking back over your long career as a scholar, do you see the culture of access to leadership changing in a positive direction?

EAGLY: Yes, somewhat. We do see, over time, more women in leadership roles for sure. It’s slow progress, as in the Congress, but it nevertheless is moving upward in most all leadership roles. So is the culture changing? Yes, and that’s one of my later projects, another meta-analysis, on the leader stereotype. We have a way of thinking about leadership and so leaders should epitomize it. That is culturally masculine that leaders take charge and are assertive and know what they’re doing and tell people what to do. But we showed across three different types of research, three different research paradigms, that that image of leadership is gravitated toward androgyny. It’s still masculine, but it’s not so extremely so. People are now expecting leadership to embody more social skills, interpersonal skills of working closely with people and bringing them onboard, and that leaders are supposed to encourage followers and motivate them and be more teachers and coaches of them rather than just telling them what to do and scolding them when they’re not doing it or something. That has changed in the culture in many contexts so it’s less extremely masculine.

SCARPINO: If the culture of leadership is a little bit more androgenous than it was, is that because women who want to become leaders are acting more like stereotypical men, or because there has been give on both sides and we are redefining what it takes to be a leader?

EAGLY: That’s an interesting question because we don’t entirely know why it has changed. Your typical organizational theorists give an explanation that has nothing to do with gender. It’s the nature of organizations, that organizations are flatter structures where leaders are not just up here sort of determining things. It’s very complex instead. If you think of building cars or something, you have all kinds of different expertise brought together. It’s very international. It’s very complex. So the leader, or the CEO, has to be so engaged in so many ways to do a good job that it does take a lot of social skill as well as other kinds of skills. And then a lot of organizations are pretty flat, so people have to engage other people pretty directly even though there are managers and vice presidents or whatever. Your typical organizational expert says that. Then you could say “Well, we have so many more women. Thirty-nine percent of all managers are now women in the U.S., and that maybe women did it differently and that redefined leadership.” And that may be true to some extent, but I don’t know of any proof of that. That women have to do it like men is a misconception that some women have because we know that if women act like men, nobody likes them, and they get into all kinds of trouble with people. So, that’s not typically the phenomenon. Most women are pretty smart and they learn that if they operate in a more androgenous repertoire that they can be more successful. They shouldn’t be super-feminine. That doesn’t usually work because that’s seen as weak, but they’re kind of, I think, pushed into a more androgenous behavioral repertoire because people react to them better. That would redefine leadership, right, if they’re doing that? So there may be some of that, but we don’t have the kind of research that has sorted that out. It would be a difficult question to address empirically, I think.

SCARPINO: In 2007, you co-published with Linda Carli a book titled Through the Labyrinth: The Truth About How Women Become Leaders, which I would describe, I guess, as more for a general readership than most of your previous work?

EAGLY: Yes, that’s how we wrote it.

SCARPINO: It was published in the Leadership for Common Good series of the Center for Public Leadership of the John F. Kennedy School of Government of Harvard University. . .

EAGLY: Yes.

SCARPINO: . . .and, of course, Harvard has the MBA program there. What made you decide to do that?

EAGLY: I felt. . .

SCARPINO: It sort of breaks the mold of what was done for ages?

EAGLY: . . .I felt there was all that work on leadership and there was a huge amount of public interest, and so to bring it together and make it accessible. It’s kind of a crossover book rather than truly a trade book because most of the trade books on leadership are very qualitative. They’re full of examples and experiences. We wanted to make the research accessible because we think it’s very informative. So we did. I think it’s moderately successful. It sold pretty well. But it’s not a big-time trade book.

SCARPINO: So you don’t have a yacht called the Labyrinth or anything?

EAGLY: No, we don’t. It sold about 17,000 copies. It is widely used in courses, too. Say people have a course on gender and leadership or even a course on leadership; these leadership programs or sometimes in business schools or undergraduate courses. It’s academic enough that professors would take it who are concerned that students know that there’s research. But then it’s read out there some by managers and other people.

SCARPINO: We might imagine for a moment that somebody will read this transcript or listen to this recording who is not familiar with your body of work and maybe has not read this book, so could you explain what the labyrinth represents?

EAGLY: It does represent women’s careers in a sense, and the challenges. So the book does explain the challenges. We do have chapters on like the work-family issues, the work-life issues as part of the challenges and then the whole business about the stereotyping and how that affects how people react to women and the backlash phenomenon and then the leadership style piece; how women and men do it and whether it makes a difference. We explain all these challenges that make up the labyrinth, and we use it to some extent as an integrating device. We refer to the labyrinth, “Well, here is this challenge” and “Well, that’s just part of the labyrinth.” It helped us to have a way of integrating the pieces of the book. I hope it helps people in their understanding because I think metaphors are important because they give people something to grasp mentally. Then they can add other phenomena to it in their thinking. That’s not unreasonable that there is that backlash, given that the whole thing is a labyrinth anyway, that women do have these challenges. Yeah, I thought it was helpful.

SCARPINO: What did you conclude was the truth about how women become leaders?

EAGLY: Oh, well that’s not something you can summarize in a sentence or two.

SCARPINO: What would you say are the salient points that might prompt somebody that their next step would be to the library to pick up the book?

EAGLY: Like the work-family issues, a lot of social scientists discuss that; that’s not very distinctive. The distinctive aspects are that we knew a lot about leadership style and a lot about the kind of prejudice aspects and so how that all fits together. Women’s style sort of addresses the potential for prejudice and the conditions under which backlash occurs. To understand this level of phenomena, I think, helps people actually behaviorally; helping people understand the nature of leadership. It does demand directiveness and some degree of assertiveness or whatever. So to help women to understand that probably the androgenous route is their best route and that does not mean acting like a man, but it does not mean crying at work and using some stereotypic soft feminine maneuvers. So to help people understand those things and to anticipate that they may get negative reactions of various sorts and particularly from men in some context. So it’s not some shock. You shouldn’t sort of ignore it. You should understand that it’s there and it’s not because of me as an individual that I’m failing here necessarily, it’s because of the broader phenomenon of gender in society. So to take some of the onus off the individual woman as she understands that the process is broader than herself.

SCARPINO: Do you think that’s important for women to know if they have those aspirations?

EAGLY: I think so, because otherwise if you’re in a situation where there have been few women and you have this leadership role and you sort of don’t have that much legitimacy with some audiences, maybe particularly the men, to understand that that is a situation that’s pretty challenging actually and why is it challenging. Then when you get this backlash or some undermining or whatever, not necessarily to think “Well, I can’t do this; I’m failing here because I’m just not good enough,” it might be that it’s more that you’re a breakthrough woman and this is part of what happens. But hang in there because you’re in a labyrinth and if you stick in the labyrinth, you’re going to get to your goal. That’s the other part; persistence is a labyrinth message. You always get to the center of the labyrinth if you work at it.