Reframing the Gender Gap Elicits Action by Women, Researchers Say
Flipping the way the gender gap in political leadership is described in news coverage – from women are underrepresented to men are overrepresented – can help narrow the gulf, according to researchers led by Usman Liaquat, an ILR School postdoctoral associate.
“Women underrepresented or men overrepresented? Framing influences women's affective and behavioral responses to gender gap in political leadership” will be published in March in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology print edition. Co-authors are Madeline E. Heilman, a New York University professor; Rachel D. Godsil, a Rutgers Law School professor; and Emily Balcetis, Ph.D. ’06, a New York University professor.
How gender disparities in political leadership are described in the media influenced women’s anger. It also impacted their psychological engagement with the gap, including motivations to take actions such as writing to policymakers to support gender bias reduction initiatives. Researchers reached these conclusions after three experiments with over 10,000 participants.
Mock news articles based on genuine data – such as that 71% of Congress is male – helped researchers gauge reactions. Participants read the mock stories describing the gender gap as the abundance of men or the dearth of women in leadership. The researchers found that women were more angry and took more action to address disparity when the gap was depicted as the overrepresentation of men.
Men did not have the same response as women to this reframing. The paper states that men “did not seem to show a change in anger at the gender gap across framing conditions, perhaps because they defensively downplayed the existence of bias and discrimination when reminded that their group was overrepresented in leadership.”
However, when reframing the gender imbalance in the Fortune 500 business leadership context, neither men nor women reacted differently when the gender gap was reframed strongly. Researchers wrote that one possible reason for that response is that “Political leadership is elected by constituents, whereas business leadership is typically appointed by boards of a select few individuals.”
“My takeaway is that we often don’t realize that how we describe social issues can profoundly impact how readers psychologically experience those social issues. This work suggests that we need to be mindful of how we describe social disparities,” said Liaquat, an ILR Future of Work research fellow.
“Our work builds on prior work showing that framing can influence who we hold responsible for the disparities. So, when you focus on the dearth of women in leadership, the reader might ask questions like, ‘Why are women not motivated? Why are women not skilled enough to be leaders?’ But shifting the focus away from women makes people question whether there have been biases against them,” Liaquat said.