Peters, Kim, Jeftić, Alma, Ballard, Timothy, et., al., Evans, Thomas ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6670-0718, et., al. and Ziółkowski, Artur (2026) Think political leader: think He or She? A multi-country test of a gender-fair language intervention to reduce gendered leadership stereotypes. The Leadership Quarterly: An International Journal of Political, Social and Behavioral Science. ISSN 1048-9843 (Print), 1873-3409 (Online) (In Press)

PDF (Author's Accepted Manuscript) 54321 EVANS_Think_Political_Leader_Think_He_Or_She_(AAM)_2026.pdf - Accepted Version Restricted to Repository staff only Available under License Creative Commons Attribution Non-commercial No Derivatives. Download (1MB) | Request a copy

Abstract

Women are greatly underrepresented in positions of political leadership around the world. In seeking to explain this underrepresentation, some researchers have pointed to people’s tendencies to stereotype leaders as more similar to men than women as these tendencies can support the belief that women are unsuited to leadership. This project aimed to test whether a subtle linguistic intervention was able to ameliorate this gender bias in political leadership stereotypes across different languages and national contexts (country/region N = 42, language N=30, sample N = 22,996). Specifically, this project examined whether gender-fair language (e.g., the use of paired pronouns ‘he or she’) can reduce the tendency for people to stereotype political leaders as more similar to men than women. To increase the rigor with which these stereotypes were measured, this project complemented the dominant ‘cheap talk’ measure of personal stereotype content with an incentivised community measure of this content. As expected, participants stereotyped political leaders as more similar to men than women; this pattern was stronger on the incentivised measure of community stereotypes. Unexpectedly, there was no evidence that paired pronouns reduced this bias (there was weak exploratory evidence that paired nouns increased participants’ tendencies to stereotype political leaders as more similar to women). This project suggests that the ability of gender-fair language interventions to ameliorate gender bias in the political leadership domain may be limited.

Item Type:	Article
Uncontrolled Keywords:	leadership, gendered language, stereotypes
Subjects:	H Social Sciences > H Social Sciences (General) J Political Science > JA Political science (General) P Language and Literature > P Philology. Linguistics
Faculty / School / Research Centre / Research Group:	Faculty of Education, Health & Human Sciences Faculty of Education, Health & Human Sciences > Institute for Lifecourse Development Faculty of Education, Health & Human Sciences > Institute for Lifecourse Development > Centre for Professional Workforce Development Faculty of Education, Health & Human Sciences > School of Human Sciences (HUM)
Last Modified:	02 Sep 2026 14:09
URI:	https://gala.gre.ac.uk/id/eprint/54321

Actions (login required)

View Item

Downloads