Lean in messages increase attributions of women’s responsibility for gender inequality.

Abstract

Although women’s underrepresentation in senior-level positions in the workplace has multiple causes, women’s self-improvement or “empowerment” at work has recently attracted cultural attention as a solution. For example, the bestselling book Lean In states that women can tackle gender inequality themselves by overcoming the “internal barriers” (e.g., lack of confidence and ambition) that prevent success. We sought to explore the consequences of this type of women’s empowerment ideology. Study 1 found that perceptions of women’s ability to solve inequality were associated with attributions of women’s responsibility to do so. Studies 2, 3, 5a, and 5b experimentally manipulated exposure to women’s empowerment messages, finding that while such messages increase perceptions that women are empowered to solve workplace gender inequality, they also lead to attributions that women are more responsible both for creating and solving the problem. Study 4 found a similar pattern in the context of a specific workplace problem, and found that such messages also lead to a preference for interventions focused on changing women rather than changing the system. Studies 5a and 5b sought to replicate prior studies and document the weakened effects of messages that explicitly explain that women’s “internal barriers” are the products of “external barriers” obstructing women’s progress. This research suggests that self-improvement messages intended to empower women to take charge of gender inequality may also yield potentially harmful societal beliefs.

Understanding Diversity Ideologies From the Target's Perspective: A Review and Future Directions

“…Another potential consequence of a purely gender-blind ideology, which disregards some of the unique challenges women face, could be to blame women for their disadvantaged position. That is, gender-blindness can, while being empowering, also enhance “victim blaming” (see Kim et al, 2018).…”

System justification: Experimental evidence, its contextual nature, and implications for social change

“…Moreover, our recent work has found that too much focus on the individual, rather than systemic, contributors to inequality may have pernicious consequences. Specifically, we found that exposure to individually focused messages which promoted women's empowerment to overcome ‘internal barriers’ (e.g., a lack of confidence and ambition) that prevent workplace success (e.g., to ‘lean in’; Sandberg & Scovell, ) led to increased attributions that women were responsible for both creating and solving the problem of gender inequality (Kim, Fitzsimons, & Kay, ). Collectively, these findings suggest that when the institutional‐level contributors to inequality are overlooked, potentially harmful individual‐level blame might occur.…”

Exploring the Odds: Gender Differences in Departing the Engineering Profession

“…The second implication from these results is that organizations’ investment in developing programs to retain women engineers need to move away from trying to “fix women” by asking them to lean in (Sandberg, 2013) or equipping women engineers with more self-confidence boosting skills to fixing the work environment that can better address their needs for comfort and status, just as it would for their male counterparts. Recent reports have suggested that strategies such as asking women to “lean in” not only fail to yield desired results, but in some cases backfire and lead to departure (e.g., Kim, Fitzsimmons, & Kay, 2018; Toosi, Mor, Semnani-Azad, Phillips, & Amanatullah, 2019). A third implication of this research is that while discorrespondence between the person and the environment can be addressed either by actively changing the work environment or by changing their own needs, employees may rationalize their needs as not being that important or reprioritize their important values.…”