Unwelcome voices: The gender bias‐mitigating potential of unconventionality

• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1002/smj.3104
• Published date: 01 April 2020
• Author: Owen Parker,Varkey Titus,Rachel Mui
• Date: 01 April 2020

RESEARCH ARTICLE

Unwelcome voices: The gender bias-mitigating

potential of unconventionality

Owen Parker

1

| Rachel Mui

2

| Varkey Titus Jr.

3

1

Department of Management, Spears

School of Business, Oklahoma State

University, Stillwater, Oklahoma

2

Department of Strategy and Innovation,

Rennes School of Business, Rennes, France

3

Department of Management, College of

Business Administration, University of

Nebraska-Lincoln, Lincoln, Nebraska

Correspondence

Owen Parker, Assistant Professor,

Department of Management, Spears School

of Business, Oklahoma State University,

Stillwater, OK 74078,

Email: owen.parker@okstate.edu

Abstract

Research Summary:Substantial evidence indicates that

leaders are perceived through a lens of gender bias, but

what mitigates such bias remains underexplored. Examin-

ing men and women in creative, project-based leadership

roles, we integrate insights from role congruity and gender

bias literatures to predict how project unconventionality

and leader gender affect external perceptions of project

quality. We argue that prejudice against female leaders is

strongest for conventional projects due to the established

presence of male-centric prototypical projects which

induce bias, but that project unconventionality weakens

this bias by distancing the project from these male-centric

prototypes. We find support for this using a sample of

1,414 films by 32 major film studios (1990–2014) across

three measures of perceived quality: moviegoer ratings,

critic ratings, and film awards.

Managerial Summary:Despite recent strides in gender

equality, women are still highly underrepresented in leader-

shippositionsacrossallkindsoforganizations.Thisispartly

because society still views women as “less fit for

leadership,”and this both prevents the appointment of female

leaders and damages audience perceptions of the few projects

that women do lead. Surprisingly, we know little about how

to address this bias. In this study, we predict that in terms of

how audiences rate the quality of a project, “unconventional”

projects are less susceptible to gender bias. After examining

1,414 feature films from 32 major studios, we find that

whether audiences rate a female-directed film poorly depends

Received: 19 November 2018 Revised: 17 September 2019 Accepted: 21 September 2019 Published on: 25 November 2019

DOI: 10.1002/smj.3104

738 © 2019 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Strat Mgmt J. 2020;41:738–757.wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/smj

on its conventionality—conventional films favor male direc-

tors, while unconventional films favor female directors.

KEYWORDS

creative industries, gender, leader, perceived quality, role congruity

1|INTRODUCTION

Female leaders are less prevalent, less esteemed, and often viewed as less fit for their leadership position

(Lyness & Heilman, Lyness & Heilman, 2006). Consequently, among Fortune 500 firms as of

2019, only 21% of board members, 27% of executives, and 5% of chief executives were women

(Catalyst, 2019); in the U.S. Congress, women have never comprised more than 25% of the total

legislative body, and in 2014, Janet Yellen became the first female U.S. Federal Reserve Chair in

its century-long history. Female representation is even lower in certain contexts, such as creative,

project-based industries. From her appointment in 2007 to the time of this study, Baltimore Sym-

phony Orchestra director Marin Alsop was the only female music director of a major

U.S. orchestra. Similarly, among major films released in 2018, women comprised just 4% of all

directors and 3% of all cinematographers (WomenAndHollywood.com, 2018), and although

women comprise 80% of fashion graduates at some top schools, they run just one-sixth of fashion

brands (Pike, 2016) and rarely design for the top firms.

To explain this, scholars tend to underscore perceptions of role (in)congruity as a source of gender

bias—that is, that one's gender dictates perceived fitness for leadership (Eagly & Karau, 2002). But

while research has focused on how a leader's gender shapes perceptions of their capability (Oakley,

2000) or impact (Eagly & Karau, 1991), little is known about how these biases might be mitigated.

This oversight has critical theoretical and practical implications, as a shift toward more female partic-

ipation in leadership may exacerbate these biases even as we remain relatively underinformed about

how women might circumvent the hazards they face.

We focus on the implications of leader gender in creative, project-based industries and theorize

that project unconventionality—defined as the degree of distinctiveness of a focal project versus typ-

ical alternatives (which does not necessarily include a paradigmatic shift in novelty or radical innovation,

as we will discuss in the Theoretical Development section) (Zhao, Ishihara, Jennings, & Lounsbury,

2018)—mitigates gender bias in terms of how external stakeholders perceive the project's quality. Consis-

tent with prior research, we define a project as any discrete product or organizational initiative observable

by stakeholder audiences (Prencipe & Tell, 2001). Particularly in creative industries—for example, films,

video games, performing arts, architecture, and fashion—projects are both (a) evaluated separately from

the firm's larger portfolio (DeFillippi & Arthur, 1998) and (b) closely intertwined with perceptions of the

project's leader (Jones, 1996).

We contend that, since leaders are often the “face”of their projects in such creative contexts

(Wiesenfeld, Wurthmann, & Hambrick, 2008), the bias that disadvantages female leaders—and

the perceptions about their projects—is pronounced in such industries. We then theorize that

since the origin of this bias is rooted in perceptions of role (in)congruity (Eagly & Karau, 2002),

a mechanism that shapes such “role perceptions”should also shape this gender bias effect. To

that end, we assert that the effect of leader gender on stakeholder perceptions of project quality

is contingent on the project's level of conventionality. A project's conventionality directly

PARKER ET AL.739