Context shapes images of women as leaders.(transformational leadership)

Harvard University has its first woman president. Congress has its first woman Speaker of the House. As of this writing, a woman is a strong contender to become the first major-party candidate for President of the United States.

But progress is uneven and negative images of women leaders persist. Representation of women among college and university presidents more than doubled from 1986 to 1998 and then slowed, reaching 23% in 2006. By contrast, only 2% of Fortune 500 companies have women CEOs, despite evidence that women and men in senior management are equally eager to rise to CEO.

"Are there really women's ways of leading, or is there just good leadership?" Liesl Hutchins-Eberhardt asked at the University of Nebraska's Women in Educational Leadership conference in Lincoln in October. A faculty member at the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs, she's writing her dissertation at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln on how context affects perceptions of women's leadership.

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Abundant evidence suggests that stereotypes and perceptions contribute to the glass ceiling that keeps women from reaching top levels at the same rate as men. The difference between academic and corporate settings isn't just that one employs more women than the other. It's not just that boards of trustees or regents are more progressive than corporate boards. Women in different settings are perceived differently, even if they do exactly the same things.

Gender and leadership

Leadership theory used to follow a military model stressing strength, power and control. Leadership was an innate quality of certain great men. Allegedly women were born with different skills and grew up to be nurturers, not leaders.