Female CEOs Change How Firms Talk about Women

Karen Hopkin is a scientist. My name is Karen Hopkin.

A powerful company has a top executive. A person who is confident and clever, decisive and determined is what you would imagine. You are probably imagining a man. You wouldn't be too far off the mark.

Women make up 50 percent of the population but only 7 percent of S&P 500 CEOs are female.

Asher is a graduate student in business at Duke University. One way to change the way we think about leadership is to talk about it. When it comes to describing women, organizations are more likely to use words that are associated with achievement if there is a female CEO. Their findings were published in the national academy of sciences.

According to the United Nations, gender equality is the greatest human rights challenge of our time. Some of the factors that perpetuate these gender inequalities are the focus of our research.

The team took a closer look at corporate speak and the words businesses use to refer to women.

Language gives us insight into how people think about women in a way that doesn't rely on them reporting it themselves.

Asking companies how they feel about females can lead to some fanciful forecasting.

They will almost always say yes if you ask them if they believe in gender equity or fairness because of social desirability concerns.

The researchers looked at the shareholder reports and investor documents of S&P 500 companies to see if businesses talk the talk and walk the walk. They looked for associations between words that signify women, like she and her, and words that mean leadership, like assertive or effective.

How likely is it that the next word is powerful if you use an autocomplete system like you do on your phone?

They assessed this association...

How do these associations change when a woman is hired as a leader? There was a correlation between the hiring of women as senior leaders and an increased association with leadership-congruent qualities.

It wasn't that the companies extolled the virtues of their own staff.

New CEOs and board members aren't the only topics discussed. It generalizes to talk about women in a broader way. We were happy to see this result.

They were wondering if there would be a backlash if a woman is seen as more competent.

There was no decrease in the association between being caring and these types of qualities.

The data shows that organizations with the biggest boost in female-linked leadership language are more likely to hire more women.

This shows the opportunity for a cycle of snowballing effects. Appointing women leads women to be more closely associated with certain qualities that are seen as necessary to be leaders, and this can lead to more women being hired in the future. It is very exciting to watch.

Something will be written about in her next annual report.

Karen Hopkin is for Scientific American's 60-second science.

This is a transcript of the show.