Cognitive equal opportunities: How the mere presentation of renowned female and male leaders affects our implicit thinking on leadership

When climbing the corporate ladder, women still have to overcome many obstacles. In trying to explain some of these obstacles, research points towards studies on Implicit Leadership Theories (ILTs). These suggest that the concepts of "woman" and "leadership"\ are cognitively less associated than the concepts of "man"\ and "leadership."\ The consequence, so the conclusion of these studies, is that it is harder for people to categorize women as leaders and react accordingly towards them. The present study investigates whether such implicit discriminatory association patterns can be fought with incongruent stimulus material. The results of our experiment using an Implicit Association Test (IAT; N=77) suggest that, after presenting pictures of renowned female leaders, participants associate womenwith leadership as fast as they do men. This effect, however, shows stronger for females in the sample, while no significant change was found in male participants' reaction times. Based upon these results, we discuss the role pictures may play in organizational equal opportunity programs, for instance, as part of organizational communication.

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