What is it about?
When women in leadership face biased evaluations, we tend to ask what those women should do differently. This paper flips that question: instead of focusing on women leaders, we focus on the people evaluating them. Based on an integrative review of decades of research across management, psychology, economics, and sociology, we develop a theoretical model explaining why the same woman leader might be praised in one setting but penalized in another. Our answer is that it depends on what motivates the evaluator. We identify three key motives: identity protection (feeling threatened by or connected to the leader based on group identity), value alignment (judging leaders in ways that confirm one's personal beliefs), and resource dependence (shifting evaluations based on one's reliance on the leader or pressure from outside parties). These motives explain why gender bias isn't applied uniformly; evaluators actively filter, emphasize, or dismiss information about women leaders to reach conclusions that serve their own psychological needs.
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Why is it important?
This reframing is timely because organizations continue investing in interventions that coach women to navigate bias, but if evaluators are actively processing information to serve their own psychological needs, these strategies address symptoms rather than root causes. Our framework points toward designing interventions that target evaluator motives rather than asking women to adapt to a biased system.
Perspectives
This paper grew out of a frustration I've carried throughout my research on gender and leadership. So much of the conversation centers on what women should do to succeed, such as adjusting their style, leaning in, and finding the right balance. But the more I studied these dynamics, the more I realized the real variability lies with the people making the judgments. Two evaluators can look at the same woman leader and reach opposite conclusions, not because of anything she did, but because of what they each need to believe. I hope this paper encourages researchers and practitioners to stop asking women to solve a problem they didn't create and start designing systems that address how evaluators' own motives shape their judgments.
Soojin Oh
University of Hong Kong
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: An integrative conceptual review of gender bias in leader evaluations: An observer-focused motive-driven process model., Journal of Applied Psychology, February 2026, American Psychological Association (APA),
DOI: 10.1037/apl0001350.
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