Voters Prefer Their Skills, So Why Are So Few Leaders Women? - Building Gender Balanced Business

Americans see women as more qualified than men in five of eight leadership skills, including the ones they call the most important — honesty and intelligence — and equal to men in two others. (Men’s sole winning attribute: decisiveness.) And yet women hold far fewer positions of power. Is it that what people say are important attributes aren’t what leads to actual decisions? Or systemic discrimination? Another survey found that hypothetical political candidates who were exactly the same except for having a male or female first name drew almost identical support — and yet while most respondents in the first survey said men and women were equally qualified to be leaders, three times as many of the minority said men were the better leaders.

The results of the PewResearchCenter’s Social & Demographic Trends survey