She Leads: What Psychology Reveals About Women and Power
Welcome to PsyberSpace. I'm your host, Leslie Poston. Today, we're talking about something science has shown us again and again. Women tend to make better leaders than men. So why doesn't the world seem to believe it?
Leslie Poston:Let's start with a simple fact. As of 2025, 28 countries are led by women. Not one of them is at war or threatening its neighbors. Many of them, including Mexico under Claudia Scheinbaum, are improving in public trust, economic outlook, and political stability. Meanwhile, male led countries account for every single active armed conflict on Earth.
Leslie Poston:And yet when people are asked, who makes a better leader? They still mostly pick men. Despite decades of research, despite clear data, despite lived experience, a deeply rooted bias persists. Today on cyberspace, we're exploring the psychology behind that. Why women tend to lead more effectively, and so many people still won't admit it.
Leslie Poston:Let's start with some data, and there's a lot of it, especially from the world of organizational psychology. One comprehensive Harvard Business Review study found that women outscored men in 17 of 19 leadership competencies. Those included integrity, resilience, emotional intelligence, teamwork, and decisiveness. Women were consistently rated more effective by their colleagues, their employees, and their superiors across multiple evaluation metrics. The research isn't limited to corporate publications.
Leslie Poston:The American Psychological Association has documented that women leaders foster healthier workplace cultures, prioritize employee well-being, and create higher engagement among teams. Organizations with women in leadership organizations with women in leadership positions show measurably better performance across key indicators, including profitability, employee satisfaction, and retention rates. A Florida State University study revealed that women are significantly more likely to exhibit transformational leadership behaviors, the kind of leadership that inspires and motivates rather than simply commanding compliance. Transformational leadership is strongly linked to innovation, long term organizational success, and sustainable performance improvements. What makes the data so interesting is its consistency.
Leslie Poston:Meta analyses examining decades of leadership research across industries, cultures, and organizational types show the same pattern repeatedly. This is not cherry picked data or isolated findings. It's robust, replicated research from multiple independent sources, all pointing in the same direction. The psychological implications here are profound. When we see such consistent results across different contexts and measurement approaches, it suggests we're looking at fundamental differences in how leadership behaviors manifest and impact outcomes.
Leslie Poston:The question then becomes not whether women lead more effectively, but why this effectiveness persists across such diverse settings and what psychological mechanisms drive these differences. During COVID nineteen, the contrast and leadership effectiveness became impossible to ignore. Research specifically examining pandemic responses found that countries led by women consistently demonstrated more effective crisis management across multiple measures. These leaders showed superior communication strategies, more transparent decision making processes, and better coordination of public health responses. What makes it psychologically interesting is that the advantage wasn't just about policy choices.
Leslie Poston:It reflects fundamental differences in how different brains process threat and uncertainty. Neuroscientific research reveals that male and female brains activate different neural networks when confronting crisis situations. When faced with acute stress, the male brains typically showed increased activation in areas associated with fight or flight responses. Regions linked to quick decisive action, but also to tunnel vision and reduced consideration of alternatives. The female brains, by contrast, showed heightened activity in areas associated with social cognition, collaborative problem solving, and what research were calling tend and befriend responses.
Leslie Poston:This neurological difference translates directly into leadership behaviors during a crisis. Women leaders are more likely to seek diverse input, build coalitions, and maintain open communication channels, exactly the behaviors that crisis management research identifies as most effective for navigating complex uncertain situations. The psychological concept of cognitive flexibility is so important here. Crisis situations require leaders to rapidly process new information, adjust strategies, and coordinate complex responses. The neural networks that are more active in the female brains that were examined during stress are precisely those that support cognitive flexibility and adaptive thinking.
Leslie Poston:Think about what this means for organizational resilience. When a crisis hits, you want leaders whose brains are wired to gather information, build alliances, and adapt strategies based on changing circumstances. The neurological architecture that evolution has seemingly shaped in female brains based on this analysis provides exactly these capabilities. Empathy isn't just a soft skill. It's a sophisticated cognitive ability with measurable impacts on leadership effectiveness.
Leslie Poston:Research consistently shows that women score significantly higher on empathy measures compared to men. But the psychological mechanisms behind this advantage reveal why empathy is so critical for modern leadership. Neuroimaging studies demonstrate that empathy activates mirror neuron systems, allowing leaders to literally understand and predict their employees' experiences and reactions. This creates theory of mind, the ability to understand that others have beliefs, desires, and intentions that are different from our own. Leaders with stronger theory of mind capabilities are measurably more effective at motivation, conflict resolution, and team coordination.
Leslie Poston:But empathy's leadership value goes deeper than just individual interactions. It enables what we call emotional contagion, the ability to influence the emotional climate of entire organizations. Leaders who can accurately read and respond to emotional states create psychological environments that either enhance or undermine performance across their entire sphere of influence. The concept of psychological safety becomes central here. Psychological safety is the shared belief that team members can express ideas, concerns, and mistakes without fear of punishment or humiliation.
Leslie Poston:Research shows us that psychological safety is one of the strongest predictors of team performance, innovation, and learning. We've talked about that on a couple of podcasts now, so you can go back, listen to one of those, and learn more deeply about that concept. Women leaders' superior empathy skills naturally create conditions that promote psychological safety. They're more likely to notice when team members are struggling, to recognize unspoken concerns, and to respond in ways that validate rather than threaten. And this isn't just being nice.
Leslie Poston:It's leveraging sophisticated emotional intelligence to optimize group performance. The neurological basis for this advantage lies in brain regions like the anterior cingulate cortex and insula, which are typically larger and more active in women. These areas are critical for processing emotional information, detecting social conflicts, and generating appropriate responses to others' emotional states. When these systems function more effectively, leaders can navigate the complex interpersonal dynamics that determine whether teams thrive or merely survive. Traditional leadership models, often shaped by military hierarchies and industrial age thinking, favor transactional leadership approaches.
Leslie Poston:These involve clear chains of command, usually top down, directive communication, and reward punishment systems. But decades of organizational psychology research reveals why these approaches are increasingly ineffective in modern work environments. Our human brain has evolved sophisticated threat detection systems that constantly scan for potential dangers. Authoritarian leadership style activate these threat detection networks, flooding employees' brains with stress hormones like cortisol. When people feel threatened or controlled, their brains shift resources away from higher order thinking, like creativity, problem solving, and innovation, and down toward basic survival functions.
Leslie Poston:Women leaders are significantly more likely to adopt transformational leadership styles. Instead of commanding compliance, they inspire engagement. Instead of controlling through fear, they motivate through purpose and connection. This activates completely different neural pathways and followers, specifically reward and motivation systems that promote creative thinking and intrinsic motivation. The psychological mechanism here involves what Albert Bandura called collective efficacy, a group's shared belief in its capability to organize and execute actions required to produce given attainments.
Leslie Poston:When leaders share power, solicit input, and distribute credit, they strengthen the entire team's confidence and competence. This creates an upward spiral where success breeds more success, and team members become increasingly capable and motivated. But there's an even deeper psychological principle at work. Collaborative leadership activates shared mental models, synchronized understanding of goals, processes, and expectations. When team members develop shared mental models, they can coordinate more effectively, anticipate each other's needs, and respond to challenges with a unified purpose.
Leslie Poston:Brain imaging studies of highly collaborative teams revealed something really interesting. They develop similar neural firing patterns during problem solving tasks. They literally begin to think together more effectively. So not group think, like you might get in a corporate brainstorming session, but actually better thinking. But there's an even deeper psychological principle at work.
Leslie Poston:Collaborative leadership activates what we call shared mental models, synchronized understanding of goals, processes, and expectations. When team members develop shared mental models, they can coordinate more effectively, anticipate each other's needs, and respond to challenges with a unified purpose. Brain imaging studies of highly collaborative teams reveal something really remarkable. They develop similar neural firing patterns during problem solving tasks. They literally begin to think together more effectively, not groupthink where everyone is going to the lowest common denominator and acquiescing to the same bad idea, but kind of a synchronized cognition that allows them to process information faster, generate more creative solutions leaning on each of their individual strengths but as a group, and implement changes more smoothly.
Leslie Poston:Women's natural inclination toward collaborative approaches isn't just a stylistic preference. It's an instinctive understanding of how to optimize group cognitive resources. By creating psychological conditions that allow everyone's best thinking to emerge, they multiply the intellectual capacity available to address challenges. And don't get it twisted. We are not saying that all women and all men are a monolith.
Leslie Poston:We understand that there are instances, however rare, where a woman is not a good leader. We also understand that there are instances where you might have a really great leader that's a man. We've all experienced that. Despite overwhelming evidence, public perception surveys consistently show that people still associate leadership with traditionally masculine traits. This is not just a stubborn opinion.
Leslie Poston:It's psychology working against reality through several well documented cognitive mechanisms. Our brains rely heavily on what we call schemas mental frameworks that help us process information quickly and efficiently. These schemas develop early in life and become deeply embedded in our neural architecture. The leadership schema that most people carry was given to us early in life, and it was formed likely during a period when physical dominance and aggressive competition was thought to determine our survival and group hierarchy. Even though modern leadership requires entirely different capabilities, emotional intelligence, collaborative problem solving, systems thinking, our brains still trigger recognition and comfort when we encounter leaders who match ancient templates.
Leslie Poston:When we encounter leaders who match those dominance templates, Height, deep voice, physical presence, dominant body language, these all activate our leadership schemas that we were taught and some that were inherited through epigenetics, even when these traits have no correlation with actual leadership effectiveness. System justification theory provides another layer of psychological explanation. This theory demonstrates that humans are motivated to defend and rationalize existing social systems, even when those systems disadvantage them. When women are underrepresented in leadership positions, our psychological systems work to justify this disparity by unconsciously seeking evidence that it's appropriate or natural. The cognitive process for that works a little like this.
Leslie Poston:If the current system has fewer women leaders, our brains assume that there must be a good reason for the pattern. We then become more likely to notice instances where women leaders to notice instances where women leaders have failed and less likely to notice instances where they have succeeded. We interpret identical behaviors differently based on gender, seen assertiveness in men as a strength, and the same behavior in women as aggression. This is amplified if the woman happens to be a black woman or from another minority group. This creates what we call a double bind, a psychological trap where women face criticism regardless of how they behave.
Leslie Poston:If they display traditionally feminine traits, they're seen as too soft for leadership. If they display traditionally masculine traits, they're criticized for being unlikable or inappropriate. Men rarely face this contradiction because masculine traits align with traditional leadership schemas. The double bind creates enormous psychological pressure on women leaders and contributes to stereotype threat, the fear that one's behavior might confirm negative stereotypes about their group. This fear can actually impair your performance, creating a self fulfilling prophecy that reinforces the original bias.
Leslie Poston:Brain imaging studies have revealed that when people observe women in authority positions, the brains that are being scanned have shown increased activation in areas associated with rule violation and social conflict. This happens unconsciously, even among people who consciously support gender equality. Our neural architecture is literally working against our conscious values. When organizations undervalue women leaders, they don't just create unfairness, they systematically undermine their own performance through what economists call efficiency losses. The psychological mechanisms behind these losses reveal why gender bias is ultimately self defeating for any organization or society.
Leslie Poston:Research on cognitive diversity shows us that homogenous leadership teams fall prey to groupthink, the tendency to seek harmony by avoiding dissent and failing to critically analyze alternatives. When leadership teams lack gender diversity, they miss critical perspectives and make systematically worse decisions. The psychological process has several mechanisms on this. First, similar backgrounds and experiences create similar blind spots. Leaders who share demographics tend to share assumptions, biases, and thinking patterns.
Leslie Poston:This similarity feels comfortable and reduces conflict, but it also reduces the cognitive resources available for problem solving. Next, homogenous groups develop confirmation bias amplification. When everyone thinks similarly, the group becomes increasingly confident in its assumptions and less likely to seek disconfirming evidence. And this leads to overconfident decision making and inadequate risk assessment. A woman's presence in leadership activates constructive dissent, healthy questioning of assumptions and exploration of alternatives.
Leslie Poston:Research tracking business decisions over time shows that gender diverse leadership teams spend more time analyzing problems, they consider more alternatives, and they make fewer catastrophic errors. The psychological concept of intersectionality becomes more crucial when we consider black women in leadership. Black indigenous and Latino women face what we call intersectional invisibility. They're experiencing both racial and gender bias simultaneously, creating unique psychological pressures and barriers. When organizations fail to recognize and address these compound effects, they lose access to perspectives that could provide even greater cognitive diversity.
Leslie Poston:The stress of navigating bias has measurable physiological effects. Women leaders, and particularly black women leaders, show elevated cortisol levels and other stress markers that impact both health and performance. This is creating a vicious cycle where bias impairs performance, which then gets used to justify continued bias. From an organizational psychology lens, when qualified people are consistently overlooked or undervalued, it's creating what is called psychological contract violation throughout the culture. Employees observe that merit isn't fairly rewarded, leading to decreased engagement, reduced innovation, and higher turnover among even the most talented individuals.
Leslie Poston:Looking at current women leaders through a psychological lens reveals consistent patterns that illuminate why their leadership styles are so effective. Claudia Scheinbaum in Mexico exemplifies what we call evidence based leadership, making decisions based on systematic analysis rather than intuition, ideology, or political pressure. A climate scientist by training, Scheinbaum approaches policy challenges through scientific thinking, forming hypotheses, gathering data, testing assumptions, and adjusting strategy based on results. This cognitive approach reduces the emotional reactivity and ego driven decision making that often plague political leadership. Her communication style demonstrates what we call transformational communication.
Leslie Poston:She inspires change through vision and emotional connection rather than through fear or manipulation. Transformational leaders help followers transcend their immediate self interest for the sake of larger purposes, creating psychological conditions that promote both individual growth and collective achievement. In Denmark, Meta Fredriksen exemplifies inclusive leadership. Her style actively seeks diverse perspectives and creates psychological safety for dissenting voices. Inclusive leaders understand that their own cognitive limitations require input from others, and so they create systems that encourage honest feedback even if it challenges their assumptions.
Leslie Poston:The psychological principle at work here is intellectual humility, the recognition that one's knowledge is limited and that learning requires openness to being wrong. Leaders high in intellectual humility make better decisions because they gather more information and remain more responsive to changing circumstances. Barbados prime minister Miyamatli demonstrates moral courage, the willingness to take stands based on principle rather than convenience. Her climate advocacy illustrates how transformational leaders can influence global conversations despite leading a small nation. The psychological mechanism she uses is moral elevation, the capacity to inspire others to higher standards of behavior.
Leslie Poston:When we analyze the approaches of all 28 current women heads of state, several psychological patterns emerge. They tend to exhibit higher levels of emotional regulation, maintaining calm and focused decision making even under pressure. They demonstrate superior social intelligence, building coalitions, and managing relationships across diverse stakeholder groups. They show greater future orientation, considering long term consequences rather than just immediate political or financial gains. Perhaps most significantly, none of these leaders are currently engaged in military aggression against their neighbors.
Leslie Poston:This isn't coincidence. It reflects psychological tendencies toward collaboration over domination, problem solving over conflict escalation, and relationship maintenance over relationship destruction. Understanding why certain expressions of masculinity create leadership problems requires examining the psychological mechanisms involved. Traditional masculine norms, such as emotional suppression, dominance, hypercompetitiveness, and extreme independence, activate destructive leadership patterns. When leaders suppress emotions, they literally impair their own decision making capacity.
Leslie Poston:Neuroscience research demonstrates that cognition and emotion are integrated systems of the brain. The areas responsible for rational thinking are extensively connected to the areas that process emotional information. Leaders who pride themselves on being purely rational are actually operating with compromised neural function. The psychological concept of alexithymia, difficulty identifying and expressing emotions, becomes relevant here. Leaders high in alexithymia can struggle to read social situations, to understand stakeholder concerns, and to respond appropriately to interpersonal dynamics.
Leslie Poston:They may appear strong and decisive, but they're actually operating with reduced access to crucial information about the human elements of leadership. Dominance based leadership triggers reactance in followers, the motivation to restore freedom when it feels threatened. When people feel controlled or coerced, they often respond with resistance, reduced performance, psychological withdrawal. Organizations led by highly dominant leaders typically show lower engagement, higher turnover, and more workplace conflict. The psychology of hypercompetitive masculinity creates zero sum thinking, the belief that resources, recognition, and success are finite, and so others must lose for one person or one nation to win.
Leslie Poston:This mentality prevents the collaborative problem solving that complex modern challenges require. It also creates organizational cultures characterized by internal competition rather than collective effort. Research on compensatory masculinity, something that we've done an entire episode on in season one, reveals another problematic pattern. Some men, particularly when they feel their masculinity is threatened, overcompensate by displaying exaggerated masculine behaviors. They have increased aggression, increased risk taking, and increased dominance.
Leslie Poston:This compensation often leads to poor leadership decisions that are driven more by ego needs than organizational requirements. The concept of masculine honor cultures also helps explain why some male leaders struggle with admitting mistakes or changing course. In these psychological frameworks, admitting error or accepting input is seen as weakness rather than wisdom. This creates leaders who persist with failing strategies rather than adapting based on new information. When organizations reward these patterns, promoting leaders who appear confident and decisive regardless of their actual results, they create toxic leadership cascades.
Leslie Poston:The psychological environment becomes characterized by fear, competition, and political maneuvering rather than trust, collaboration, and a shared purpose. Transforming leadership selection and development requires understanding the psychological barriers that maintain current patterns and implementing evidence based interventions to address them. The science of behavior change gives us clear guidance on how to create more effective leadership systems. First, we must change how we define and measure leadership effectiveness. Instead of relying on subjective impressions or traditional markers like confidence or charisma, organizations need to focus on measurable outcomes, team performance, employee engagement, innovation rates, retention statistics, long term sustainability metrics.
Leslie Poston:Women consistently excel in these areas, but they're often overshadowed by leaders who simply look or sound more traditionally authoritative. The psychological principle here involves outcome bias, the tendency to judge decisions based on their results rather than the quality of the decision making process at the time. By focusing on actual results rather than perceived results, organizations can identify and promote leaders who create genuine value rather than just leaders who give impressive presentations. Next, leadership development programs need to be redesigned based on current neuroscience and positive psychology research. This means training that prioritizes emotional intelligence, collaborative decision making, systems thinking, and adaptive learning.
Leslie Poston:These capabilities aren't naturally distributed by gender, but research shows that women are more likely to already possess them or to be receptive to developing them. The concept of growth mindset also becomes important here. Leaders who believe abilities can be developed through effort and learning are much more effective than leaders who see leadership as a fixed trait. Women are more likely to approach leadership development with growth mindsets, making them more responsive to training and more likely to continue improving over time. Next, addressing unconscious bias requires system level interventions, changing the structure and processes that allow bias to influence decisions.
Leslie Poston:This includes using structured interviews, implementing diverse evaluation panels, creating standardized assessment criteria, and establishing accountability measures for diversity outcomes. The research on bias interruption shows us that awareness alone is not sufficient to change behavior. People need specific tools and systematic processes that make bias visible and correctable. When organizations implement these systems, they see significant improvements in the recognition and advancement of qualified women leaders. And finally, we need to address the cultural narratives about leadership that shape how we think about authority and competence.
Leslie Poston:The concept of stereotype threat shows us that negative cultural messages can actually impair performance by creating that anxiety and self doubt. Creating more inclusive leadership narratives benefits everyone by reducing psychological barriers to effective leadership. The evidence is overwhelming and consistent across decades of research. Women demonstrate superior leadership effectiveness across virtually every measure that matters for organizational and societal success. This isn't opinion or preference or ideology.
Leslie Poston:It's empirical reality supported by neuroscience, psychology, management science, and observable outcomes. The psychological barriers that prevent recognition of this reality are understandable products of evolutionary history and cultural conditioning. But understanding these barriers also reveals how we can overcome them. When we focus on results rather than perception, evidence rather than assumption, and long term success rather than short term comfort, the path forward becomes clear. The question is not whether women can lead effectively.
Leslie Poston:Science has settled that question definitively. The question is whether our psychological biases, institutional practices, and cultural narratives can evolve to match what the research has been telling us for decades. The organizations and societies that make this adaptation will have significant advantages in the coming years when we're facing massive climate change and migration due to that climate change and changes in how the global economy works. Those that don't will continue to under perform not just their potential, but potentially put their society at risk. Thanks for listening to PsyberSpace.
Leslie Poston:I'm your host, Leslie Poston, signing off. Until next time, stay curious, and maybe help your organization catch up to what the science has been telling us all along. Don't forget to subscribe so you never miss a week, and maybe share this with a friend if you think they'll enjoy it too.
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