The best bosses are breaking gender stereotypes

For decades, the advice to rising leaders has been some version of the same thing: Play to type.

Women, conventional wisdom goes, should lead with warmth and care, and avoid being too direct. Men, on the other hand, should lead with structure and decisiveness, and steer clear of anything that reads as soft.

Crossing those gendered lines invites backlash: A take-charge woman gets called abrasive — or worse. A compassionate man is seen as weak.

New research from Professor Marie Mitchell at UNC Kenan-Flagler Business School tells a different story, however.

She and her colleagues found that employees benefit most from leaders who break gender expectations: women who set clear direction and men who lead with empathy. Workers under these leaders feel less stressed, more focused and better overall.

But a second study by Mitchell and her colleagues found a catch: Those benefits come at a cost to the women and not to their male counterparts. “Women leaders get in their heads,” she says. “They feel like they’re breaking stereotypes and doing things women aren’t expected to do. The unfortunate consequence is that they become less engaged, drained and that spills into how they lead the next day.”

The research points to a solution. When teams openly value a woman setting direction, her anxiety and depletion lift. The upshot, Mitchell says, is that organizations and employees need to treat women in charge as expected, not exceptional.

“There’s nothing gendered about effective leadership,” she says. “Employees need direction and they need support. And organizations need leaders who can do both.”

The backlash myth

Mitchell has been watching how gender shapes leadership for most of her career. Before academia, she worked in HR at law firms in Washington, D.C. The questions that fascinated her then — why leaders and followers behave the way they do, and why some are punished for behaviors others are praised for — still drive her research and teaching today.

“Women have certain roles, men have certain roles, and these are deep-seated from caveman times,” she says. “Despite progress over many years, they’re still pretty prevalent.”

To test what those stereotypical roles do in practice, Mitchell teamed up with Joohyung (Jenny) Kim at City University of Hong Kong and David A. Waldman and Donald S. Siegel at Arizona State University.

In a forthcoming paper in the Journal of Management, they describe a study focused on two sides of leadership: the structural (setting goals, delegating and defining roles) and the supportive (listening, recognizing contributions and offering compassion).

During the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, they surveyed scientists and engineers working in research labs at a large U.S. public university. They asked them about their supervisors and their own well-being at three points across six weeks.

The pattern was clear. When leaders behaved against type — women setting clear direction and delegating, and men listening and offering support — employees said work felt more manageable. Their stress eased and their mental energy held up. They also reported improvements in their physical well-being, including less back pain, fewer headaches and better sleep.

Two follow-up experiments tested the same idea in a controlled setting. In the first one, participants watched scripted video instructions from AI-generated avatars, one named Jenny and one named David, delivering either directive or supportive messages. The result was the same. The avatars who broke the gender script lowered participants’ stress more than those who followed it.

A second experiment isolated the cause: The stress itself was wearing people down.

The findings raise an obvious question: What about the well-documented backlash that women face when they step outside traditional gender roles?

“There’s been a lot of misunderstanding about what makes an effective leader and what the gendered effects of leadership actually are,” says Mitchell. “Ambition, initiative, setting clear direction — our research shows no gender penalty for any of those.”

Rather, the fallout women face comes from something more specific, she says. “Nobody wants a power-hungry, dominant jerk, whether they’re a man or a woman. But the penalty for it falls harder on women.”

What women leaders carry

Mitchell’s second study found something the first didn’t measure: what those behaviors took out of the women doing them.

That study, which she co-authored with Szu-Han (Joanna) Lin and Justin P. Woodall of the University of Georgia, Nai-Wen Chi of National Sun Yat-sen University in Taiwan, and Russell E. Johnson of Michigan State University, is published in the Journal of Applied Psychology.

The team followed 133 leaders across two weeks of workdays, asking them at the end of each day what they had done at work and how they had felt. Because they captured each leader’s experience day by day, they could see how one day’s emotions shaped the next day’s behavior.

They found that on days when female leaders set clear direction with their teams — by doing things like delegating, defining roles and holding people to deadlines — they reported feeling judged for their gender. Psychologists call this “gender stereotype threat” — the anxiety that comes from worrying you’re confirming a negative stereotype about your group.

That anxiety takes a toll on female leaders, says Mitchell. “They become exhausted. Disengaged. Emotionally, physically and cognitively bankrupt. They’re constantly aware that what they’re doing might be read as something a woman isn’t supposed to do,” she says.

The next day there were consequences. Women who had felt stereotype threat pulled back from leading, doing less of the direction-setting that had triggered the exhaustion, and dropping the supportive work, too. Men in the same study showed no equivalent effect.

What changes the equation

There was one condition under which the pattern broke. When women’s teams openly welcomed her direction setting, the leader’s exhaustion lifted, raising their ability to engage in effective leader behavior the next day. The fix, in other words, is on the people around women leaders.

Mitchell says organizations must make supporting women’s leadership the default. That can happen through mentorship and performance reviews. It can also happen through selection and promotion processes that reward women for setting direction. Over time, those signals change what people expect from female leaders.

Representation matters, too. The more women a company has in senior leadership, the less weight the stereotype carries for the women coming up behind them; the picture of what a leader looks like starts to widen.

This work won’t happen overnight, according to Mitchell. Still, she sees the answer as simple. “Both women and men leaders should be effective by being directive and supportive,” she says. “It isn’t about gender. It’s just what good leaders do. And that’s what employees respond to.”