Gender asymmetries and the manager stereotype among management students

Abstract

In spite of the progress made in the last decades, women still face difficulties in being accepted and recognised as managers. The manager’s role has been perceived as masculine, and the gender stereotypes are therefore, a barrier to women’s access to management. With the aim to explore the relationship between gender stereotypes and management characteristics and discuss its implications for the discrimination of women in management a study was conducted among Portuguese undergraduate management students. The findings indicate that students of both sexes tend to perceive the “manager” category as closer to the masculine stereotype than to the feminine stereotype. Additionally, for male students the “man manager” and “manager” are more similar to each other than the “woman manager” and “manager” categories. However, the image of “woman manager” appears not to distance itself considerably from the “manager” stereotype as a result of her masculinisation. This paper discusses the implications of this asymmetric gender social representation that ultimately hinders the acceptance of women as a social group in the management context.

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