The Mirror and the Window: Making Implicit Perceptions of Leadership Explicit

Abstract

Images of leadership serve as mirrors reflecting assumptions and as windows revealing possibilities. We take a visual and less common methodological approach and highlight particular images by way of a linguistic and stylistic analysis. The foundation of this study—an archive of 8,283 images and essays—is noteworthy, since it represents nearly the entire population of undergraduates at an elite business school over the past 16 years. Our analysis reveals the salient commonalities and subtle differences in male and female perceptions. On one hand, the most frequently posted male and female images of leadership are assertive and concerned about the welfare of others and combine stereotypical and archetypal masculine and feminine characteristics. The act of leadership is also transformational and empowering rather than transactional and directive. On the other hand, the qualities of leadership are value-centric for both male and female students; but males are more inclined to see hierarchy and agentic qualities, while females are more likely to see communal characteristics. Moreover, the vast majority of images is male, but female students put a greater emphasis on gender nonspecified subjects and are twice as likely as male students to identify the subject of leadership as “she.”

Keywords

leadership and management education implicit leadership theory stereotypes and gender bias

In The Loudest Duck, Laura Liswood (2009) tells a story about Vigdis Finnbogadottir, “the first and the longest sitting woman president in the world (1980-1996)”:

When I spoke with her, she told me that after about eight years in office, she started to notice that children under the age of eight often thought that only a woman could be president. President Vigdis had many boys ask her if the president of Iceland could be male. Because the boys had only ever known a woman to be president, they didn’t understand that they could possibly be president of their country some day. This is one way we learn how the world works, especially when we are young and impressionable—understanding the future of the world to be as we see it at that moment. We quickly come to believe that our experiences and observations represent not only how the world works but also how it should work. I call this the power of the mirror. We know what we can be by what we see. (pp. 57-58)

With the “power of the mirror,” we can make tacit perceptions of leadership explicit and make room for different manifestations of leadership. Images of leadership serve at once as mirrors reflecting present assumptions and as windows revealing future possibilities.

Implicit perceptions of leadership matter in theory and practice. Schyns, Kiefer, Kerschreiter, and Tymon (2011) would support Liswood’s comment about the “power of the mirror”; they observe that “the perception of actual leaders is not independent of the perceiver’s implicit leadership theories” (p. 399)—in other words, the everyday images of leaders and their characteristic traits and behaviors (Schyns & Schilling, 2011). Moreover, research “assessing individuals’ implicit leadership theories has shown that the mental images individuals hold influence how they see a person labeled ‘leader’” (Schyns et al., 2011, p. 399). The rub is that when it comes to gender stereotypes, we tend to overplay the differences and underplay the similarities. As Fiske (2010) cautions, “For gender, in particular and for many other groups, the similarities are often greater than the differences between the groups. The differences divide us and oversimplify a complex, textured reality” (p. 691). Even if overplayed, as Prime, Carter, and Melbourne (2009) show, gender stereotypes disadvantage women leaders in the workplace. The women in their study may have held positive stereotypes of women’s leadership, but

men did not perceive that women leaders had an advantage at several aspects of the more stereotypically feminine, participative repertoire of leadership behaviors. These results suggest that changes in leadership ideals towards stereotypically feminine behaviors may not be enough—despite speculation to the contrary—to increase the acceptance of women leaders in the corporate leadership ranks. (pp. 46-47)

Following Wren (1994), we turned to visual images to teach leadership and to make implicit perceptions explicit. In fall 2001, we began asking our students to complete this simple assignment before the first day of class:

Consider the essence of leadership, find or create an image that captures your understanding of the essence of leadership, upload the image and copyright information, and then write a short essay explaining why the image captures the essence of leadership as you see it.

The fact that the assignment counts 5% of the final grade encourages a thoughtful choice of image within an unlimited range of choices. The use of a text box with a maximum character limit of 2,000 also helps ensure that the essays are roughly the same length. Students then come to the first class with images and essays in hand and share their perceptions of leadership with their classmates. As Schyns et al. (2011) point out, the act of drawing and then sharing the meaning of the drawing—like the act of selecting an image and then sharing the meaning of the image—makes “implicit views explicit, thus raising self-awareness of implicit leadership theories” (p. 402).

Like Schyns et al. (2011) who use drawings in their research study, we also take a visual and less common approach in this study. As Warren (2009) says in her review of research practices, “Visual research methods in organization studies represent a nascent, flourishing, and different methodological field to that which has gone before” (p. 566). Unlike other researchers who take a visual approach (see, e.g., Bagnoli, 2009; Barner, 2008; Bryans & Marvin, 2006; Pridmore & Bendelow, 1995; Schyns et al., 2011), we select the images in our study by way of a linguistic and stylistic analysis of the words students use to describe their images. Analyzing our students’ key words—the most frequently used verbs, adjectives, nouns, and pronouns—gleaned from the database of essays reveals the overarching story they tell about leadership and gives us a better understanding of prevailing similarities and subtle differences in male and female perceptions of leadership. By sorting through the database of essays describing leadership images, we discover that the students of the “virtual generation” see leadership in a manner more consistent with a paradigm that Dugan (2006) summarizes as “post-industrial” and largely “transformative, value-centered, non-coercive, and collaborative” as opposed to “industrial” and transactional (pp. 217-218). The students in our study see leadership as more empowering than directive; leaders pull, rather than push, others along.

We are also able to examine whether our students’ explications are consistent with the largely gender-stereotypic findings of earlier research; we can see, for example, whether male students perceive the act of leadership as transactional and whether female students see the exercise of leadership as transformational (see Eagly & Johannesen-Schmidt, 2001; Eagly, Johannesen-Schmidt, & vanEngen, 2003; Eagly & Johnson, 1990; Rosener, 1990). Informed by research by Eagly and Karau (2002), we can also explore how male and female students describe leadership and how they describe the images of leadership that they select. Male undergraduates do not talk primarily about leadership in terms of “agentic characteristics,” revealing the leader’s “assertive, controlling, and confident tendency.” Male images are not primarily described as “aggressive, ambitious, dominant, forceful, independent, self-sufficient, self-confident, and prone to act as a leader.” Female undergraduates do not primarily talk about “communal characteristics” when describing leadership. Female images of leadership are not primarily concerned “with the welfare of other people—for example, affectionate, helpful, kind, sympathetic, interpersonally sensitive, nurturant, and gentle” (p. 574).

Understanding the overarching story that our students tell about the action, quality, subject, and agent of leadership enables us, as instructors, to anticipate the trajectory of class discussion. Greater understanding of male and female perspectives will also serve our students well in the long run. By making our students more aware of male and female perceptions of leadership, we will better equip them to enter the workplace. In much the same way that Deborah Tannen (1994) argues for “flexibility and mutual understanding” in her work Talking from 9 to 5, we hope that enhanced awareness of similarities and differences across gender will prompt our students to stop, pause, and think about the expectations they carry with them as they step out of our classrooms and into the workplace (p. 126). In the process of contributing to the leadership development of our students, we also hope to add to the study of leadership and management education, implicit leadership theory, stereotypes, and gender bias.

Course Description

From 1993 through fall 2016, our Management course has served as the foundation leadership, teamwork, and communication course taken by all incoming undergraduates at a business school situated within a large university. With its emphasis on transformational experience as the source of wisdom and knowledge, our foundation Management course is indebted to the work of David Kolb (1984). The hallmark of the course is experiential learning. Since developing leadership, teamwork, and communication skills are the main objectives, the course rewards both group and individual performance; 50% of grades are group grades, and 50% are individual, with the image of leadership assignment counting 5%. Although we have used the images of leadership assignment in a variety of ways in the course (see Maxwell & Greenhalgh, 2011), the exercise serves mainly as a bookend, a way of opening and closing the class. On the first day, the assignment acts as an icebreaker and values exercise. Students sit with their group, share their images as a way of getting to know one another, and select one of the individual images to stand as an emblem of the whole group’s aspirational values. On the last day, the exercise reveals the lived values of each group and students’ implicit associations. Student groups revisit the images they selected as emblems to see if their aspirational values became core values. Moreover, a reveal of the most frequently posted images of leadership in our archive makes the students’ implicit perceptions of leadership explicit.

Participants

The total number of images and related essays in this study is 8,283. Of the total, 61.35% were submitted by male students (5,082) and 38.65% by female students (3,201). The gender designation of the student authors comes directly from the archive, which pulls demographics from the university’s Student Record System (SRS). Aggregate data from SRS also shows that the composition of a class of freshmen is roughly 50% minority (defined as American Indian/Alaskan Native; Asian or Pacific Islander; Black, non-Hispanic; Hispanic; White, non-Hispanic; Other; and Multiple Race-Ethnicity), 75% U.S. citizen, and 25% international by citizenship. This database and archive of images and essays is especially noteworthy since it represents nearly the entire population of undergraduates at an elite business school over the past 16 years.

We have focused on freshmen in particular for reasons of pedagogy and impact. Prime et al. (2009) make a persuasive case for studying senior business leaders because this demographic group “has considerable control over women’s access into corporate leadership” (p. 27). As they point out, undergraduate students constitute a more common object of study (see, e.g., Biernat & Kobrynowicz, 1997; Heilman, Wallen, Fuchs, & Tamkins, 2004; Sczesny, 2003). Although more than 10,000 students (freshmen, upper-level transfer, and dual-degree students) have enrolled in our Management course since fall 2001, we have limited our study to freshmen because we wanted to discover our students’ tacit perceptions before they set foot in a university classroom and before they attended a lecture or completed a reading for our course. As instructors, we were in the habit of asking our students to read what others thought. Over time, we began to wonder, “What do our students think?” We were covering topics (trait, skills, and styles, to name a few) in popular textbooks such as Leadership: Theory and Practice by Peter G. Northouse (2006). Along the way, we realized that tacit perceptions of leadership are typically subtexts; for example, Northouse’s chapter on gender and leadership contains a discussion of prejudice and gender stereotypes (pp. 404-406). As instructors dedicated to student learning, we wanted to make our students’ perceptions the first text and starting point of our course. By discussing our students’ perceptions of leadership in the first class of their first semester, we make use of the power of the mirror to reflect tacit assumptions and open the window to future possibilities at the very start of their academic career. As Schyns et al. (2011) argue, “Leaders who are aware of differences in implicit leadership theories between themselves and their followers (disagreement) and among their followers (differentiation, lack of consensus) have made a first step in altering their own behavior” (p. 404).

Methodology: Identifying Key Words

Using technology created by our Learning Lab, we searched each essay for the most frequently used key words occurring across all 8,283 essays written each fall from 2001 through 2016. Since we are interested in the primary vocabulary of all students (rather than the emphatic repetition of particular words by individual students), we made the unit of measure the essay. By “key word,” we mean the most frequently used verbs, adjectives, nouns, and pronouns. We selected these parts of speech because they reveal the action, quality, subject, and person exercising leadership. Our key word list includes the top 25 verbs, top 25 adjectives, and top 25 nouns plus 8 personal pronouns. This frequency gave us insight into the many similarities and subtle differences in the way in which male and female students talk about leadership.

We initially sorted the four key parts of speech according to the first entry in the Merriam-Webster’s Online Dictionary (2016). After the initial automatic sorting, we excluded words in the essay’s prompt and a few related words from our analysis, because we assumed that many students would echo the prompt at the beginning of their essays by writing “The image that captures the essence of leadership for me is . . .” Therefore, we omitted the verb capture and its cousin represent. We also omitted all forms of the verb lead from our analysis. In addition, we know from reading essays that students use the word made more often as a verb than as an adjective, so we refined the automatic sorting accordingly. We omitted the nouns image and its close second picture, as well as the nouns example, essence, leadership, leader, and leaders. The word well is automatically sorted as a noun (“the well”), but we know from reading thousands of essays that our students use this word as an adverb rather than as a noun, so we took well out of the list of key nouns.

We refined the sorting of key words according to the principles outlined by W. Nelson Francis (1958) in The Structure of American English so that our lists of verbs, adjectives, and nouns could stand alone. Francis (1958, as cited in Greenhalgh, 1988):

distinguishes between those parts of speech that are “full,” or full-fledged, and those that are not. Full verbs, adjectives, and nouns have lexical meanings that are separable from the context in which they occur (examples are come, blue, and water). Such full parts of speech stand in contrast to pronouns, auxiliaries, and qualifiers (such as one, can, and all), whose meanings are wholly dependent on the linguistic context in which they occur. (pp. 4-5)

Pronouns round out our lists of full-fledged parts of speech because we recognize, like Francis (1958), that this subgroup of nouns “comprises eight words whose importance far outweighs their number”: I, we, you, he, she, it, they, and who (pp. 244-245). Since we are interested in the frequency of the eight personal pronouns in relationship to the words whose lexical meanings are separable from structural meanings, we summarize below the way Francis identifies each full-fledged part of speech—verb, adjective, and noun.

Following Francis (1958), we define verbs as a class of lexical words marked by their use of four inflections and six derivational affixes; by their formation of verb-phrases through the use of auxiliaries, including is, has, get, can, may, shall, will, do, must, dare, and need; by their appearance in certain positions, such as the first position in an utterance and the position between two nouns; and by their use of stress patterns that mark, for example, imprint as a verb and not a noun or adjective (pp. 252-268). Since we are interested in the nuances of difference between the ways in which our male and female students talk about the leadership action, we list tenses separately.

In keeping with Francis (1958), we define adjectives as “a class of lexical words identified by their ability to fill the position between noun-determiner and noun and the position after a linking verb and a qualifier such as very, rather, and quite.” This category also includes “base adjectives” that “form their comparative and superlative degrees by means of the inflectional suffixes {-er} and {-est}” (pp. 268-281). We list base adjectives, comparatives, and superlatives separately to capture nuances of difference between the ways in which our male and female students describe the qualities of leadership.

Following Francis (1958), we define nouns as a class of lexical words marked by their appearance following noun-determining function words, such as the, my, some, and two; by their use of the two inflections, the plural {-es} and the possessive {-’s}; by their use of derivational suffixes, including [-ing]; by their characteristic appearance just before a verb, and occasionally by patterns of stress that distinguish nouns from other parts of speech—the noun suspect, for instance, from the verb suspect (pp. 237-242).

Once we arrived at a list of key verbs, adjectives, nouns, and pronouns, we subdivided the list according to the gender of the student author. Each subdivided list constitutes what Kenneth Burke (1969) calls a representative anecdote, a vocabulary that is at once a reflection, selection, and deflection of reality: “Men seek for vocabularies that will be faithful reflections of reality. To this end, they must develop vocabularies that are selections of reality. And any selection of reality must, in certain circumstances, function as a deflection of reality” (p. 59). The single list of key words constitutes the representative anecdote our undergraduates as a whole tell about leadership; the subdivided lists reveal the subtle differences in the stories males and females tell about leadership. Moreover, we record and analyze words occurring most frequently across all essays first and those used most often by male and female students second; in this way, we are mindful of Mumby’s (1987) caution that

narratives punctuate and sequence events in such a way as to privilege a certain reading of the world. They impose an order on ‘reality’ that belies the fact that such a reading is a largely ideological construction that privileges certain interests over others. (p. 126)

Results

We know from searching all 8,283 essays to surface the 25 most frequently occurring verbs, adjectives, and nouns and the 8 personal pronouns that male and female students alike see the leadership action as primarily transformational, empowering, and uplifting. The top 10 key verbs are like, make, take, order, follow, believe, shows, achieve, see, and inspire (see Table 1 for the complete list of key verbs). Our male and female students do not talk about the leadership action in ways that are clearly gender stereotypic, in which case males would use verbs that are predominantly transactional (e.g., take, order, and follow), and females would use verbs that are primarily transformational (e.g., make, believe, achieve, and inspire). In this regard, our results support Dugan’s (2006) conclusion that “college students may relate more readily to the postindustrial leadership values associated with the social change model than industrial models focused more on management and control” (p. 222).

Table 1.

Key Verbs.

Count	Verbs both	Total	Verb male	Total	Verb female	Total
1	Like	1,932	Like	1,136	Like	796
2	Make	1,902	Make	1,128	Make	774
3	Take	1,752	Take	1,025	Order	764
4	Order	1,728	Order	964	Take	727
5	Follow	1,558	Follow	942	Follow	615
6	Believe	1,370	Shows	856	Believe	533
7	Shows	1,314	Believe	837	Achieve	469
8	Achieve	1,149	See	704	Shows	458
9	See	1,135	Achieve	680	Help	441
10	Inspire	1,031	Inspire	598	Inspire	433
11	Help	1,011	Made	582	See	431
12	Makes	909	Help	570	Change	385
13	Made	907	Makes	560	Become	381
14	Become	889	Become	508	Support	361
15	Change	851	Think	481	Create	357
16	Think	820	Change	466	Makes	349
17	Support	781	Look	463	Think	339
18	Look	771	Seen	456	Made	325
19	Takes	767	Put	453	Takes	321
20	Taking	751	Set	452	Look	308
21	Come	748	Takes	446	Taking	308
22	Set	744	Come	444	Reach	304
23	Create	727	Taking	442	Come	303
24	Put	726	Know	436	Stand	293
25	Know	724	Support	420	Set	292

Note. Differences in male and female lists are highlighted.

At lower levels of frequency, the words distinguishing the list of male key verbs are seen, put, and know; the words particular to the list of female key verbs are create, reach, and stand. With the addition of create and reach, our female first-semester students may use slightly more verbs that express transformational action than their male counterparts. All in all, male and female freshmen agree that the act of leadership is transformational, although, on balance, female students are slightly more likely than male students to say so and to see leadership in this way.

We also know that our male and female undergraduates describe leadership with adjectives that are positive and “value-centered,” to use Dugan’s (2006) terms again. The top 10 adjectives describing leadership are able, true, great, just, good, best, important, individual, different, and common (see Table 2 for the complete list of key adjectives). We may live in a “not-leadership society,” as Herman (2007) describes, and bad leadership is absolutely worthy of study, as Kellerman (2004, 2008) argues. Moreover, Schmidt-Wilk (2011) is right when she reflects, “Whenever I have unquestioningly adopted a rosy view of leadership, there has always been at least one student ready to challenge with a question like, ‘What about Hitler?’” (p. 594). In fact, in our archive, male students post Hitler as their image of leadership 30 times out of 2,954 submissions or 1.01% of the time. (As an aside, male students post Hitler as frequently as images of George W. Bush and a flock of geese flying in a V-formation.) Female students post Hitler less frequently—12 times out of 1,377 submissions or 0.87% of the time (no ties). In our experience of reading the essays students write, the male and female students who select Hitler as their image of leadership typically separate morality from leadership and comment on efficacy, effectiveness, potency, and power. Students who post images of those who are “callous, corrupt, insular, and evil,” in other words, “unethical”—as Kellerman (2008) would say—are in a very small minority. The vast majority of students in our study see leadership as a moral act.

Table 2.

Key Adjectives.

Count	Adjective both	Total	Adjective male	Total	Adjective female	Total
1	Able	2,501	Able	1,480	Able	1,021
2	True	2,258	True	1,387	True	870
3	Great	1,990	Great	1,328	Just	813
4	Just	1,980	Just	1,167	Good	782
5	Good	1,872	Good	1,090	Great	662
6	Best	1,694	Best	1,055	Best	639
7	Important	1,562	Important	933	Important	629
8	Individual	1,341	Individual	773	Different	591
9	Different	1,302	Common	750	Individual	568
10	Common	1,296	Effective	715	Common	545
11	Effective	1,221	Different	711	Successful	510
12	Successful	1,199	Successful	689	Effective	506
13	Strong	1,168	Strong	678	Strong	490
14	New	1,045	New	613	New	431
15	Right	915	Right	572	Essential	354
16	Better	914	Better	561	Better	353
17	Willing	861	Willing	524	Right	343
18	Essential	825	Necessary	472	Willing	337
19	Still	746	Essential	471	Still	310
20	Necessary	743	Still	435	Personal	299
21	Personal	727	Personal	428	Necessary	270
22	Clear	607	Greatest	423	Potential	253
23	Hard	600	United	389	Clear	238
24	Powerful	579	Hard	380	Future	230
25	Potential	579	Clear	369	Single	230

Note. Differences in male and female lists are highlighted.

At lower levels of frequency, the adjectives greatest, united, and hard distinguish the male list of key adjectives; the distinct qualities for the female list are potential, future, and single. The use of the superlative greatest by male students points to their expectation of hierarchy. As Deborah Tannen (1994) notes, “Boys’ groups tend to be more obviously hierarchical: Someone is one-up, and someone is one-down. Boys don’t typically accuse each other of being ‘bossy’ because the high-status boys are expected to give orders and push the low-status boys around” (p. 40). Taken together, the distinct male adjectives—greatest, united, and hard—connote dominance and stand in contrast to the distinct female adjectives—potential, future, and single—that suggest a concern for the growth and development of others. All in all, male and female undergraduates agree on the most salient qualities of leadership—leaders are able, true, great, just, and good. Lower level descriptors also reveal subtle differences and recall the agentic and communal qualities that Eagly and Karau (2002) would say are characteristic of descriptions of male and female leadership, respectively.

Male and female undergraduates agree that the subject of leadership is plural—people in a group or team. The top 10 primary nouns are people, group, ability, team, being, work, way, goal, world, and person (see Table 3 for the complete list of key nouns). In this regard, our students seem to intuit what Hogan and Kaiser (2005) call “the essential task of leadership: building a team” (p. 176); in their words, “We believe that, in essence, leadership primarily concerns building and maintaining effective teams: persuading people to give up, for a while, their selfish pursuits and pursue a common goal” (p. 170).

Table 3.

Key Nouns.

Count	Noun both	Total	Noun male	Total	Noun female	Total
1	People	3,959	People	2,334	People	1,625
2	Group	2,947	Group	1,738	Group	1,209
3	Ability	2,752	Ability	1,700	Ability	1,052
4	Team	2,465	Team	1,464	Team	1,001
5	Being	2,212	Being	1,299	Being	913
6	Work	2,024	World	1,212	Work	869
7	Way	2,008	Way	1,196	Goal	842
8	Goal	2,001	Goal	1,159	Way	812
9	World	1,909	Work	1,155	Person	752
10	Person	1,744	Time	1,067	World	696
11	Time	1,700	Person	991	Followers	635
12	Followers	1,574	Followers	939	Qualities	633
13	Qualities	1,561	Qualities	927	Time	632
14	Success	1,462	Man	914	Ideas	581
15	Man	1,294	Success	908	Members	564
16	Respect	1,246	Life	781	Success	554
17	Life	1,226	Respect	751	Respect	495
18	Power	1,157	Power	677	Power	480
19	Ideas	1,129	Actions	670	Direction	447
20	Members	1,092	Men	653	Life	445
21	Role	1,076	Confidence	642	Role	443
22	Actions	1,046	Role	633	Vision	409
23	Confidence	1,038	Trust	558	Guide	404
24	Direction	969	Ideas	548	Confidence	396
25	Vision	953	Position	546	Trust	392

Note. Differences in male and female lists are highlighted.

At lower levels of frequency, male students put a distinct emphasis on man and men, actions, and position, and in so doing underscore the subject of leadership as a male acting from a position of power. At lower levels, the nouns unique to female students—members, guide, direction, and vision—emphasize gender nonspecified and inclusive subjects. In the story our students tell about leadership, on the whole, they agree that the subject of leadership is plural—about people in a group or team. The subtext for male undergraduates is that leaders are men; the subtext for female undergraduates is gender nonspecificity.

The use of personal pronouns elucidates male and female preferences. The subject of leadership is gendered male; the majority of male and female undergraduates refer to their images of leadership as he (see Table 4 for a complete listing of the use of personal pronouns). In her global study of managerial sex typing, Schein (2001) concludes, “Overall, these studies lend strong support to the view that ‘think manager–think male’ is a global phenomenon, especially among males” (p. 683). For the domestic and international students in our study, we can conclude, “Think leader–think male.” In this regard, our results are consistent with findings by Koenig, Eagly, Mitchell, and Ristikari (2011) in their meta-analysis. Male students use the personal pronoun he nearly two thirds of the time, 63% or 3,202 times out of 5,082 essays; female students say he half of the time, 50.73% or 1,624 times out of 3,201 essays. In the eyes of our undergraduates, the image of leadership is decidedly male; however, female undergraduates are nearly twice as likely as their male counterparts to identify the subject of leadership as she: First-semester female students say she in 704 out of 3,201 essays (21.99%), whereas first-semester male students use she in 645 out of 5,082 essays (12.69%). As Schein (2001) observes, “In the United States many people believed that as women moved into management, managerial sex typing would diminish. And it did, among women” (p. 684). Similarly, our female undergraduates show less sex typing when it comes to leadership than their male counterparts.

Table 4.

Key Pronouns.

Count	Pronoun both	Total	Pronoun male	Total	Pronoun female	Total
1	It	5,538	It	3,341	It	2,195
2	He	4,828	He	3,202	He	1,624
3	They	3,944	They	2,336	They	1,607
4	Who	3,814	Who	2,330	Who	1,483
5	I	2,818	I	1,714	I	1,100
6	She	1,349	We	663	She	704
7	We	1,094	She	645	We	431
8	You	952	You	624	You	327

Note. Differences in frequency of he and she are highlighted.

Since writing style is habitual and students may use male-orientated language because they have been taught to do so, we wondered how purposeful is the use of he and she? When male and female undergraduates say he or she, are they pointing to a male or female image of leadership, or are they using these pronouns in a generic way, as in the expression “he or she”? Answering this question required going through each image and corresponding essay by hand, one by one. A close look at the thousands of images in which undergraduates use the pronouns he or she in their corresponding essays confirms that the default image of leadership for male and female freshmen is most certainly male. When male students say he, they mean a male image of leadership 92.25% of the time (see Table 5); when female students say he, they refer to a male image 84.79% of the time (see Table 6). Moreover, when male students say she, they mean a female image of leadership one third of the time (33.18%); they may use she more than a third of the time (37.67%) in the generic expression, “he or she,” but their image of leadership is male (see Table 7). When female students say she, they are more likely than their male counterparts to mean she: Our female undergraduates refer to a female image of leadership 54.40% of the time, more than half; they use the generic expression “he or she” 18.04% of the time (see Table 8).

Table 5.

Specific and Generic Uses of He by Male Students.

Images posted by males	2001C	2002C	2003C	2004C	2005C	2006C	2007C	2008C	2009C	2010C	2011C	2012C	2013C	2014C	2015C	2016C	Total	%
Generic uses of “he” (as in “he or she”)	10	10	12	7	12	7	12	7	11	8	15	14	13	14	18	21	191	5.97%
Generic use of “he” (image is female)	4	3	3	2	4	0	2	5	6	2	4	5	3	0	6	8	57	1.78%
Specific use of “he” (image is male)	169	187	187	139	150	165	249	187	235	187	200	192	161	196	185	165	2954	92.25%
Total number of “he” (whether generic or specific)	183	200	202	148	166	172	263	199	252	197	219	211	177	210	209	194	3202

Table 6.

Specific and Generic Uses of He by Female Students.

Images posted by females	2001C	2002C	2003C	2004C	2005C	2006C	2007C	2008C	2009C	2010C	2011C	2012C	2013C	2014C	2015C	2016C	Total	%
Generic uses of “he” (as in “he or she”)	14	6	7	5	7	2	8	14	12	7	12	18	15	18	23	19	187	11.51%
Generic use of “he” (image is female)	3	3	5	0	5	3	3	6	5	2	3	5	5	6	5	1	60	3.69%
Specific use of “he” (image is male)	79	65	83	74	80	61	81	94	104	103	93	96	105	91	82	86	1377	84.79%
Total number of “he” (whether generic or specific)	96	74	95	79	92	66	92	114	121	112	108	119	125	115	110	106	1624

Table 7.

Specific and Generic Uses of She by Male Students.

Images posted by males	2001C	2002C	2003C	2004C	2005C	2006C	2007C	2008C	2009C	2010C	2011C	2012C	2013C	2014C	2015C	2016C	Total	%
Generic use of “she” (as in “he or she”)	10	10	12	5	12	6	13	6	11	8	16	11	13	12	23	20	188	29.15%
Generic use of “she” (image is male)	14	10	16	12	10	5	23	23	14	11	15	17	19	23	17	14	243	37.67%
Specific use of “she” (image is female)	10	15	12	11	14	9	15	19	19	12	16	6	13	10	10	23	214	33.18%
Total number of “she” (whether generic or specific)	34	35	40	28	36	20	51	48	44	31	47	34	45	45	50	57	645

Table 8.

Specific and Generic Uses of She by Female Students.

Images posted by females	2001C	2002C	2003C	2004C	2005C	2006C	2007C	2008C	2009C	2010C	2011C	2012C	2013C	2014C	2015C	2016C	Total	%
Generic use of “she” (as in “he or she”)	14	6	7	5	7	2	8	14	13	7	12	21	15	14	28	21	194	27.56%
Generic use of “she” (image is male)	7	5	10	5	2	3	5	11	11	9	7	11	11	14	6	10	127	18.04%
Specific use of “she” (image is female)	19	28	36	15	21	23	19	23	19	17	26	30	24	29	27	27	383	54.40%
Total number of “she” (whether generic or specific)	40	39	53	25	30	28	32	48	43	33	45	62	50	57	61	58	704

The Most Frequent Male and Female Images of Leadership

If a majority of students in our study post a male image of leadership and a minority post a female image, we wondered, “Who is he?” and “Who is she?” Discovering the most frequently selected male and female images of leadership required looking at every essay that contained the word he or she and matching the pronoun to the image the student chose.

For male and female students alike, the most frequent male image of leadership in our archive is Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. In fact, they select Dr. King at nearly the same rate: Male students post Dr. King at a rate of 5.28% or 156 times out of 2,954 postings of male images of leadership; female students post Dr. King at a rate of 5.52% or 76 times out of 1,377 postings of male images (see Table 9). Mahatma Gandhi comes in second for male and third for female undergraduates. The fact that an androgynous figure in a cartoon group of people is the second most frequently posted male image of leadership by freshmen women underscores their inclination toward gender nonspecificity in their choice of image and word.

Table 9.

Most Frequent Male Images of Leadership Posted by Male and Female Students.

Male images posted by males	2001C	2002C	2003C	2004C	2005C	2006C	2007C	2008C	2009C	2010C	2011C	2012C	2013C	2014C	2015C	2016C	Total
Specific use of “he”	169	187	187	139	150	165	249	187	235	187	200	192	161	196	185	165	2,954
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.	7	6	6	8	7	10	11	13	8	6	9	12	19	13	12	9	156
Gandhi	9	6	12	4	9	3	9	5	9	2	9	11	3	5	2	5	103
George Washington	4	3	4	3	3	5	10	5	14	7	11	6	5	3	4	9	96
Male images posted by females	2001C	2002C	2003C	2004C	2005C	2006C	2007C	2008C	2009C	2010C	2011C	2012C	2013C	2014C	2015C	2016C	Total
Specific use of “he”	79	65	83	74	80	61	81	94	104	103	93	96	105	91	82	86	1,377
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.	3	1	7	4	3	6	4	3	9	7	2	3	12	3	2	7	76
Generic figure in a cartoon group	2	0	2	0	1	0	0	1	3	4	5	5	10	14	9	5	61
Gandhi	2	3	4	3	4	2	3	1	2	4	2	3	5	2	3	3	46

The third-most frequently posted female image of leadership for male and female students alike is Mother Theresa. In second place for female undergraduates is an anonymous, generic woman; in second place for male undergraduates is the famous painting of Liberty Leading the People by Delacroix. The juxtaposition of “every woman” and a symbol of France and the French Republic points to the way in which our female undergraduates are more open to the possibility of female leaders than their male counterparts, yet both have difficulty picturing specific female leaders. The most frequently posted female image of leadership by male and female freshmen is female—but not a woman: A mother duck with ducklings. Male students select a mother duck and ducklings 10.28% of the time or 22 out of 214 images; female students choose a mother duck 5.48% of the time or 21 out of 383 images (see Table 10).

Table 10.

Most Frequent Female Images of Leadership Posted by Male and Female Students.

Female images posted by males	2001C	2002C	2003C	2004C	2005C	2006C	2007C	2008C	2009C	2010C	2011C	2012C	2013C	2014C	2015C	2016C	Total
Specific use of “she”	10	15	12	11	14	9	15	19	19	12	16	6	13	10	10	23	214
Mother duck	3	1	0	1	2	0	1	1	0	2	3	2	1	0	2	3	22
Liberty leading the people	1	1	0	0	1	2	1	0	3	0	1	0	0	1	3	1	15
Mother Theresa	1	1	0	1	0	2	2	0	1	0	0	0	2	0	0	0	10
Female images posted by females	2001C	2002C	2003C	2004C	2005C	2006C	2007C	2008C	2009C	2010C	2011C	2012C	2013C	2014C	2015C	2016C	Total
Specific use of “she”	19	28	36	15	21	23	19	23	19	17	26	30	24	29	27	27	383
Mother duck	1	2	2	0	0	2	1	1	3	0	5	1	0	2	1	0	21
Woman (A)	0	0	0	0	1	3	1	0	0	1	3	2	1	3	0	0	15
Mother Theresa	2	1	2	2	1	0	1	0	0	0	0	1	0	1	1	0	12

In the beginning of this article, we described ourselves as instructors focused on student development, willing to use our students’ perceptions as a starting point in our course. The surprising contrast between Dr. Martin Luther King and a mother duck with ducklings led us back to our students. What do they see when they picture Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. or the mother duck and ducklings? Answering this question required a close look at student essays and images. We identified particular images of Dr. King and a mother duck by choosing the essays with the greatest concentration of key words. To do so, we counted key words exactly as they appear in our frequency charts; for example, we counted the key verb follow but not the related words follows or following. We also overlooked a key word’s function; for instance, if a student used the key verb order as a noun (as in the expression “in order”), we counted the word as originally sorted, as a verb. And, in keeping with our established methodology, we counted a key word once, regardless of the number of repetitions within a given essay. To help readers follow along, we have italicized and bolded the first occurrence of a key word in each essay and italicized the rest. The resulting set of four essays and corresponding images is representative inasmuch as the essays are replete with key words. Taken together, these essays and images reveal the prevailing similarities and subtle differences in the way our students perceive and describe male and female leadership.

Male and Female Perceptions of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr

A close reading of the most representative image and essay of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. by a single male undergraduate is emblematic of the whole (see Figure 1). The image our male student selects pictures Dr. King giving the “I have a dream” speech with one hand outstretched. The act of leadership is transformational rather than transactional, empowering rather than directive, and captured in the key verbs achieve and believe: “King set a goal to achieve equal rights for African Americans and he convinced people to believe in that goal.” Leadership qualities are value-laden: “Members of a team or group will actually work hard to achieve goals if the leader of that group/team sets good , attainable goals.” In keeping with gender expectations of agentic characteristics, Dr. King has strength. In fact, “Aspiring leaders should look to King as an example of a leader because he was strong -willed and was able to make people believe in him.” Our male student concludes: “If leaders are as strong and as likeable as King was, they too might be able to receive the amount of support King received in this image.” Although our male undergraduate emphasizes strength, the combination of the key words strong and support in the last line elevates both agentic and communal qualities; Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. is at once strong and nurturant.

Figure 1.

Most representative essay and image of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. submitted by a male student.

The most representative image and essay of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. by a single female undergraduate is similarly illustrative of the whole (see Figure 2). The image our female student chooses also depicts Dr. King delivering the “I have a dream” speech with outstretched hand; in this case, he looks at the crowd rather than the camera. Like her male counterpart, she sees the act of leadership as transformational and authoritative rather than transactional and autocratic: “My admiration of [Dr. King’s] leadership skills is founded in the masses of people who came to believe in his cause.” Indeed, “This is the mark of a great leader: to [sic] ability to make his followers want to follow rather than making people follow because of force.” Leadership is, once again, value-centric: “A true leader is not close minded [sic]. A great leader has the ability to listen to all ideas and determine the best one.” Moreover, our female student recognizes Dr. King’s status as a “prominent civil rights leader,” but she turns our attention to the care he shows for others: “Dr. King is waving to the crowd as though he was their friend rather than a prominent civil rights leader. This idea that he cares greatly about the welfare of the crowd creates trust between himself and the crowd.” By remarking on a life dedicated to the people, she ends her essay on a communal note:

In the photograph, Dr. King appears as if his being there to address the people is the most important thing in his life at that time. He does not want to be anywhere else. The audience senses this commitment and is just as committed to him. In the end, a leader is only as great as the effort he puts into leading.

Figure 2.

Most representative essay and image of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. submitted by a female student.

Our female undergraduate recognizes Dr. King’s status, but she emphasizes his concern for the welfare of others. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. is both above and of the people in the crowd.

Male and Female Perceptions of a Mother Duck and Ducklings

The most representative image and essay of a mother duck and ducklings by a single male undergraduate exemplifies the overarching leadership story told by his male colleagues as a whole (see Figure 3). The image our male student chooses shows a mother duck leading two ducklings from left to right across the water. The leadership act is transformational and empowering, about inspiring and helping others: “Leadership is one’s ability to inspire others in order to obtain a positive, beneficial result”; “A mother duckling serves as a leader to her ducklings because as a parent, she tailors herself to their needs entirely in order to help them develop and grow.” As anticipated, her leadership has a moral quality: “A mother duck walks in front of her ducklings, shows them right from wrong, and demonstrates to them the skills they’ll need to survive.” In this way, she is “a true leader,” “one that inspires by example.” Moreover, by walking in front, the mother duck takes charge and in this way embodies the agentic characteristics typically associated with male leaders. She also takes care of her young and shows concern for their welfare. In the two last lines of the essay, our male student invokes a superlative and concludes that the mother duck is the

ultimate example of a leader because a parent does whatever is necessary for his or her children. A mother duckling makes personal sacrifices and holds herself responsible for her ducklings; she acknowledges that it is up to her that they are successful.

Figure 3.

Most representative essay and image of a mother duck and ducklings submitted by a male student.

Our male student sees the mother duck as the “ultimate” leader because of her “personal sacrifices.” In this way, he casts the stereotypic concern mothers have for the welfare of others in the stereotypic male language of hierarchy. By taking care, the mother duck takes charge.

The most representative essay and image of a mother duck and ducklings selected by a single female undergraduate yet again shows that the part stands for the whole (see Figure 4). Our female student picks a similar image, a mother duck leading ducklings across the land, walking from left to right. The act of leadership is not directive and transactional but empowering and transformational:

A leader must lead by example. They cannot just tell others what to do, think , or say. They have to prove to others and themselves that they possess the knowledge, skills, and vision to lead others to greatness. This ultimately builds trust between a leader and its followers, and inspires others to achieve for greatness as well.

Figure 4.

Most representative essay and image of a mother duck and ducklings submitted by a female student.

Consistent with gender expectations, one of the examples a mother duck sets is care for the well-being of others. She shows her ducklings “how to look out for someone else, the same way she is doing for them.” The qualities of leadership have import and value. Our female student concludes: “While other qualities, such as communication, decisiveness, and confidence are all essential; I believe that none would be important if the leader was not leading by example.” With the use of the key word confidence, our female undergraduate recognizes the importance of the typically male agentic qualities of leadership and, at the same time, puts them in the context of leading by example, including the example set by demonstrating care for others. The mother duck is both confident and caring.

Discussion

We began this essay by taking a macroscopic view of the language our students use to describe the images they select. Analyzing key words—the most frequently used verbs, adjectives, nouns, and pronouns—as a whole and by gender reveals the representative anecdote our undergraduates tell about leadership and suggests the salient commonalities and subtle differences in male and female perceptions of leadership. In this respect, our findings confirm Fiske’s (2010) conclusion that “For gender, in particular and for many other groups, the similarities are often greater than the differences between the groups” (p. 691), with two important stipulations: the default image of leadership for the men and women in our study is decidedly male; and the women are more likely than the men to see leadership as gender nonspecified and to see female images of leadership. Students of the virtual generation see the act of leadership as transformational and empowering rather than as transactional and directive; males and females alike talk in terms of making, believing, and achieving. In this way, our study qualifies earlier research that supposes that males would perceive the act of leadership as transactional and females as transformational. In addition, our macroscopic view confirms that the qualities of leadership are value-centric for male and female students alike: leaders are able, true, and great. As for subtle differences, male students are more inclined to see hierarchy and agentic qualities, while their female counterparts are more likely to see communal characteristics when describing leadership. Male and female undergraduates also agree that the subject of leadership is a person or people in a group or team. For both male and female students, the vast majority of images of leadership is male, but female students put a greater emphasis on gender nonspecific subjects and they are twice as likely as male students to identify the subject of leadership as she. Moreover, a close reading of representative essays and images of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and a mother duck and ducklings supports these findings and reveals that both figures possess agentic and communal qualities—they are at once assertive and concerned about the welfare of others—and, in this way, they combine stereotypical and archetypal masculine and feminine characteristics.

The fact that the single most frequent male image of leadership for male and female undergraduates is Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. seems to make sense; after all, the population is 62% male and roughly 75% domestic (according to citizenship data from SRS); many of our students have grown up celebrating the life and legacy of Dr. King. That the female image of leadership most frequently selected by male and female students alike is an anthropomorphized mother duck leading her ducklings was surprising to us and, we assume, to our readers. How do we make sense of this choice?

Since we know that implicit perceptions of leadership develop early (see Antonakis & Dalgas, 2009; Ayman-Nolley & Ayman, 2005), early childhood reading experiences may provide one explanation. The selection of a mother duck may reflect the influence of the Caldecott Award–winning book Make Way for Ducklings (McCluskey, 1941) on our students as young children. This classic stands out among award-winning books by featuring an independent and nonsubmissive female protagonist (Clark, Guilmain, Saucier, & Tavarez, 2003). Deborah Tannen (1994) may also help us understand the choice of mother. As she observes, “Our primary image of female authority comes from motherhood” (p. 161). Accordingly, one male student quipped in his essay,

This is not a joke. When I began to think of the most dependable and influential leaders in my life I thought of my mom. And although I am not a duck, I did not want to hand in picture of my mom for my first assignment.

This student is not alone when he expresses the lack of ease—among male and female undergraduates alike—in picturing female leadership (see Prime et al., 2009, on the tension between taking charge and taking care; see Cuddy, Glick, & Beninger, 2011, on balancing competence and warmth for male and female leaders). The choice of an anthropomorphized mother duck rather than a real woman may provide a concrete illustration of what Carol Gilligan (1995) calls a “feminine ethic of care” in which women in a patriarchal society become dissociated and disconnected from the self in the attempt to privilege relationships and others above all else (pp. 120-121). In addition to disassociation, the choice seems to underscore the ways in which students continue to wrestle with what Kathleen Hall Jamieson (1995) calls the “double binds” that constrain women leaders.

As Jamieson (1995) explains, a double bind is a trap, a no-win situation. She goes on to identify five double binds: the “no-choice-choice” of womb or brain (childbearing or intellectual pursuits), the self-fulfilling prophecy of silence or shame (abiding by the sanction against speaking up or suffering the failure to do so), the no-win situation of sameness and difference (being judged against a masculine standard that results in a loss whether women claim similarity or difference), the unrealizable expectation of expressing both femininity and competence (defining femininity in a way that excludes competence, resulting in unrealizable expectations), and the double standard of aging and invisibility (granting men wisdom as they age and women “wrinkles and hot flashes”) (pp. 17-18). Although loosened since the publication of Beyond the Double Bind in 1995, these binds linger, as evidenced by the popularity of books such as Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead by Sheryl Sandberg (2013), The Confidence Code: The Science and Art of Self-Assurance—What Women Should Know by Katty Kay and Claire Shipman (2014), and The Loudest Duck: Moving Beyond Diversity While Embracing Differences to Achieve Success at Work by Laura Liswood (2009).

Implications for Management Education

The images-of-leadership exercise has easy-to-implement applications in both co-curricular programs and curricular offerings. Facilitators of co-curricular leadership programs can use our prompt and create a word cloud out of text responses that will show salience (see https://www.wordclouds.com/). Facilitators can then use the exercise as an icebreaker (ask participants to “pair and share”) and as a way to reveal the participants’ implicit assumptions about leadership. Instructors of introductory courses—such as ethics, entrepreneurship, or accounting—can use a version of our prompt to unpack commonly held stereotypes about their fields of study. Students can see if they assume that women are more likely than men to perceive misconduct (Franke, Crown, & Spake, 1997), see entrepreneurship as mainly male (Gupta, Turban, Wasti, & Sikdar, 2005), or see accounting as more gendered male than we might anticipate (White & White, 2006).

The images-of-leadership exercise also has implications for the curriculum as a whole. The fact that the majority of the most frequently posted images of leadership—Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Gandhi, Liberty Leading the People, and Mother Theresa—are figures who stand tall on a worldwide stage may reflect the broad and global perspective taken by our students. That no business leader stands alongside these top images is worthy of note. Business leaders fall short, and we need to work to close the gap by putting a greater emphasis on ethics education.

As Colby, Ehrlich, Sullivan, and Dolle (2011) remind us, a sense of public, social, and ethical responsibility has been a part of undergraduate business education from the start: “Business education began as an effort to establish university training as a way to instill in the then-new occupation of manager an understanding of purpose that was explicitly public in orientation” (p. 16). Nonetheless, each wave of ethical misconduct in the business community elicits a renewed call for teaching ethics in business schools (see, e.g., Bishop, 1992; Felton & Sims, 2005; Floyd, Xu, Atkins, & Caldwell, 2013; Sims & Felton, 2006). Barbara A. Ritter (2006) recommends requiring stand-alone ethics classes and also integrating ethics throughout the business curriculum (p. 155). Either way, Tomlin, Metzger, Bradley-Geist, and Gonzalez-Padron (2017) point out that “Despite providing students with a broad understanding of ethics theories, traditional approaches arguably fail to fully develop the skills necessary for ethical behavior” (p. 542). The reason is a “Bias Blind Spot” such that “even if students understand that ethical traps exist, they are likely to see themselves as less susceptible to ethical lapses than others, therefore failing to identify and respond to ethical dilemmas in their lives” (p. 545). The authors make a persuasive case for behavioral ethics classes that incorporate timely, in-context ethics interventions and self-reflection. Our research on implicit perceptions of leadership—spanning 16 years and including the financial crisis of 2007-2008—underscores the importance of incorporating behavioral ethics education in the curriculum with the aim of elevating the actions and reputation of future business leaders.

Borrowing from behavioral ethics researchers and educators also helps us close the “knowing and doing gap” (Pfeffer & Sutton, 1999) in our classrooms. By doing a reveal in real time and asking students to reflect on how their perceptions shape the language they use and the world they construct, we nudge our students toward more inclusive action. We can also follow the lead of Sharen and McGowan (2019) who argue for providing positive female role models in the written cases we ask our students to read—and, we would add, in the guest speakers we ask them to see in our auditoriums and lecture halls—because “as educators, we consciously and unconsciously shape our students’ identities as managers and leaders through what we teach, how we teach it, our choices as role models, the discussions we entertain in the classroom, and the materials we select” (p. 159).

Limitations and Opportunities for Future Study

One of the limitations of our study is that our population is elite and mainly male; this limitation prompts additional research opportunities. For example, ethnic images of leadership are worthy of further exploration. Images of Rosa Parks and Harriet Tubman and a Chinese civilian standing up to tanks in Tiananmen Square are among the top 10 images posted by men and women in the archive. The fact that the majority of students posting these images are not African American or Chinese in origin makes these choices all the more worthy of study. Although we have the capability of matching demographic data with images posted, we have yet to do so. What are the demographics of the subset of students posting images of Rosa Parks and Harriet Tubman or tanks in Tiananmen Square? Are they African American or Chinese American or Chinese nationals in origin? Other management educators and researchers could do the same exercise with their students, collect the demographic data, and investigate the same questions. Are these images mirrors, reflecting the students’ sense of self, or are these images windows opening up future possibilities?

We would also like to do a temporal analysis of our data set. Our database provides multiple generations at the same stage in life. Have female leaders become more salient between 2001 and 2016? We would like to know if the overarching story of leadership our students’ picture changes as they mature and enter the workforce. We see an opportunity to do similar analyses of the essays and images generated by our MBAs, executive MBAs, and participants in executive education programs. What is the impact of increasing age and work experience on perceptions of leadership? Does the language become increasingly transactional? Do the qualities of leadership remain value-centric? Do the most frequent images of leadership combine competence and warmth, as we suspect they will? Do female images of leadership become even less frequently chosen? We would like to pursue these research questions with the aim of using the results to enhance the leadership development of our students at all levels of their education, from undergraduate to executive.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank the Al West Learning Lab at The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, for making possible the archive of essays and images as well as the automatic sorting of the language our students use to describe their corresponding images of leadership. We would also like to acknowledge the invaluable contribution made by our research assistant Jennie Walsh, who combed through thousands of images to make sure our count was accurate and conclusions well founded.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Anne M. Greenhalgh

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