Date of Award

2009

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Bachelor of Arts

Department

Psychology

First Advisor

Crystal Hoyt

Second Advisor

Cindy Bukach

Abstract

Despite numerous advances in the eld of women's rights and a general decline in explicit discrimination, there still exists a dramatic lack of women in leadership positions across America. This research seeks to expand upon past studies suggesting that there is a basic cognitive incongruency between traditional male and leadership roles which leads ordinarily "unbiased" individuals to perceive women as less suited r leadership positions than men. Thus, this experiment investigates the implicit biases against women leaders by asking if the subtle addition of gender information alters individuals' initial impressions of leadership capability in an applied hiring task involving resumes, letters of reference, and trait-based evaluations. Results suggest that once gender was made salient through a letter of reference men are evaluated more favorably than women as leaders, as measured by greater difference scores between the initial and post trait questionnaires in terms of their agentic and overall leadership trait scores than males.

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