Women in leadership often face backlash for assertive behavior because it conflicts with gender stereotypes of women being warm and nurturing. Past research suggests that highlighting warmth can reduce this backlash. Still, doing so can be difficult to maintain alongside the assertiveness that leadership can require, and it may also unintentionally reinforce gender expectations. Instead, new research (Feng et al., 2025) explores whether portraying competence, or striving to be seen as capable and qualified, can reduce the “dominance penalty” that women face.
THE RESEARCH STUDY
The authors conducted two field studies in Chinese companies where employees rated their leaders on dominance, competence, status, and leader effectiveness. They also ran two U.S.-based experiments: one where participants wrote about experiences with their own leaders, and another where they read fictitious performance reviews of male or female leaders varying in dominance and competence.
Overall, they found that when women were seen as less competent, dominance hurt their ratings of leader effectiveness. However, when women were also viewed as highly competent, dominance no longer harmed their evaluations—and their ratings were similar to those of dominant men. This occurred because, at lower levels of competence, dominant women were perceived as lower in status (i.e., granted less respect and deference), which in turn led to lower evaluations of their leadership effectiveness.
PRACTICAL IMPLICATIONS
Taken together, female leaders may benefit from signaling their competence to others, especially when they need to exhibit authority. Strategies to do this could include highlighting their technical expertise, accomplishments, or credentials. Managers can also play a crucial role in shaping how women are perceived, such as by how they introduce or talk about female leaders. Organizations can reduce bias by establishing objective criteria for leadership evaluation and promotion. In addition, it may be beneficial to utilize 360-degree feedback, which is when an employee is evaluated by multiple sources, such as managers, colleagues, and direct reports. This will help organizations gather broad perspectives on a leader’s competence and reduce the dominance penalty.
Feng, Z., Ma, A., Dwivedi, P., & Liu, F. (2025). The competence shield: Fostering competence perceptions weakens the dominance penalty for women in leadership. Journal of Applied Psychology. Advance online publication.
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