The Intersectional Role-(In) Congruity Effects of Age and Gender on Leadership Evaluations

Abstract

Over the past decades, the Western workforce has experienced two notable demographic shifts: there has been an increase in the percentage of women occupying leadership roles and the workforce is aging. Considering these two trends in unison, it would be intuitive that the future workforce will be defined by an increasingly age and gender-diverse group of leaders. However, although the general percentage of female leaders has increased, this percentage decreases sharply in upper leadership and executive roles. The current theory on barriers to female leadership ascension contains conflicting propositions and has largely examined gender issues in isolation from other factors (i.e., age stereotypes). We aim to create consensus across the literature on age and gender-based leader prototypes by investigating intersectional role-congruity bias as a predictor of barriers to career advancement for age and gender-diverse individuals. We integrate fundamental propositions from role congruity theory within an intersectional framework to examine the joint influence that age- and gender-based agentic-communal role norms exert on leadership evaluations. Through the application of experimental vignette methodology across two studies ( N 1 = 163, N 2 = 466), our results suggest that (a) the positive effect of age on leadership prototypicality is attenuated for women, (b) traditional biases associated with female leadership are dependent upon age, and (c) male leaders receive a consistent and age-dependent bonus in ratings when displaying gender atypical communal behaviors. Implications for practice and research are discussed.