Since the business upheavals of the 1980s, when women began to fill more management positions, corporate leadership studies have documented that female leaders achieve better economic outcomes than male leaders in uncertain conditions, and organizations with female chief executives face fewer discrimination lawsuits.
This leadership pattern also has shown up in the world political arena during the COVID-19 Pandemic, when female leaders navigated better health outcomes for their citizens. Studies focusing on what women offer in the changing workplace concur on the differences in leadership styles of men and women.
The February 2024 study by organizational psychologists Alex Stajkovic and Kayla Stajkovic, called “Ethics of Care Leadership, Racial Inclusion, and Economic Health in the Cities,” explores the question, “Is there a female leadership advantage?” They note that as historic outsiders to industry, women have fresh eyes to see what is no longer working and to identify new solutions.
The Stajkovic study discusses the 1973 work of Mintzberg, who drew on interviews of five male executives who identified as “company men” with a top-down chain of command, monopoly of information, deep but narrow focus, skills developed to follow procedures, values of conformity to corporate norms, and focus on goals, competing, and winning.
Compare this to the 1990 discovery by author Helgesen and sociologist Rosener that female leaders do not perceive themselves as “company women” but as agents of transformation who share information, invite participation in decisions, build relationships, ensure that others feel included, and take a long-term focus, seeing themselves and their colleagues as humans with varied backgrounds who react differently to work challenges.
Helgeson identified this as a "female leadership advantage," and Rosener summarized these gendered leadership characteristics as transactional for men and transformational for women.
The Stajkovic study analyzed 272 American cities and 788 unique mayors over 36 years. Cities with female mayors were significantly associated with better economic health than cities with male mayors.
Male and female elected leaders and city managers report approaching their roles differently from one another. Men approach equity issues with an agenda-improvement mindset, making incremental changes to programs, fixing bureaucratic procedural issues, and allocating funds to regulatory bodies, whereas women trend toward agenda-building, such as “reshaping or transforming the agenda,” offering new views and ways of doing things, and prioritizing novel inclusive policies to form a “we are in this together” platform emphasizing a “because we care” value.
Traditional mayoral priorities focus on economic development, such as securing investments, boosting new ventures, supporting real-estate developments, boosting consumer spending, maintaining and developing infrastructure like roads, bridges, water/sewer systems, and offering reliable mass transportation, school systems, policing, and prisons.
These mayoral activities amass substantial resources for their cities, but sole reliance on markets to bring economic vitality has been ineffective because business growth does not always raise all sectors in communities.
When practices from predictable times don’t apply, leadership as a process of motivating effective group behavior is vital. The Stajkovics find that the leadership values that female mayors bring include recognizing and accommodating the diverse interests and groups embedded in urban life, and making intentional choices to rebuild communities and make their cities more inclusive.
Maximum economic health in cities requires buy-in from fragmented community members. Women, who traditionally are more engaged than men in their communities, center their involvement around volunteerism and activism and value care as a moral virtue more than men.
They tend to be more “sensitive, attuned, and responsive to moments of differences, and feel responsible for working with the differences.” They also tend to course-correct toward inclusion, community building, and collaboration.
The Stajkovic study suggests that the female leadership advantage can be partly ascribed to a gender difference in moral values that encourages social harmony: Ethics of Care Leadership. They define ethics as voluntary rather than contractual care, and leadership as action cultivating attentiveness toward others and responsiveness to their needs.
They describe Ethics of Care Leadership as an active process that expends physical and mental energy and applies from one person to entire communities. The interests of those caring and those who are cared for are interwoven, rather than independent or competing.
The Stakjovics explain that acts of caring are transformative because they help people to live in mutually beneficial relations with others. Ethics of Care Leaders follow rules as an important baseline and move their communities forward by cultivating relationships.
Broader collaboration enables women leaders to leverage knowledge and skills from multiple stakeholders and make decisions by drawing from a richer source of information; in this way, women are often seen as relational leaders who value interdependence, benevolence, and tolerance. By nurturing collaboration across city constituencies, women galvanize efforts toward racial inclusion in which more residents contribute to the local economy.
Racial inclusion was significantly and positively related to economic health. The Stajkovics found that compared to cities with male mayors, cities with female mayors have healthier economies because women’s ethics of care leadership style offers access to economic opportunities and other benefits for city residents regardless of their race or ethnicity, helping more city residents to contribute to and share in the benefits.
Leaders who adopt a shared vision and collaborate across sectors devote effort to elevating the voice of minority residents, enact policies that remove barriers, and craft narratives that bind together inclusion and economic growth. Women mayors, compared to men, balance social and economic prerogatives and achieve greater economic health because they embrace ethics of care leadership.
While these findings do not imply that all women espouse caring values and men do not, they do shed light on leadership approaches that drive effective outcomes in both short-term crises and longer-term societal ills.
The female leadership advantage of ethical care validates the importance of balancing and bridging equal gender and racial participation in economies and in societies as a whole.
References
Mintzberg, H. (1973). The nature of managerial work. Harper & Row.
Helgesen, S. (1990). The female advantage: Women’s ways of leadership. Bantam.
Rosener, J. B. (1990). Ways women lead. Harvard Business Review, 68, 119–125.
Stajkovic, K., & Stajkovic, A.D. 2024. "Ethics of Care Leadership, Racial Inclusion, and Economic Health in the Cities: Is There a Female Leadership Advantage?" Journal of Business Ethics. Vol. 189. Issue 4.
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