Trust in Scientists: Many Labs Study

I’ve studied trust in leaders (and if it differs by team gender diversity and leader gender; here) and if humor affects trust in job interviews (here). But trust in scientists?

As part of the Swiss contingent of scholars working in a massive, Many Labs study led by Viktoria Cologna (Harvard) and Niels Mede (UZH), we surveyed more than 70,000 people across 67 countries to explore public trust in scientists.

Results show that average trust was high; people also agreed that scientific methods are the best way to test if something is true. However, these effects differed by country (e.g., trust in scientists was highest in Egypt, India, and Nigeria but lowest in Albania, Kazakhstan, and Bolivia) and political orientation (e.g., “left-leaning” orientation was positively associated with trust in Canada, the United States, the United Kingdom, Norway, and China).

These findings have important and timely implications for scientists’ successful involvement in public policy as well as their engagement with areas of public concern (e.g., global pandemics and other grand challenges such as climate change).

For the pre-print, see here; the data will also be made publicly available after our paper is published (it’s current status is “revise and resubmit”).

We were delighted to see the paper awarded “Best Data Collection: Quantitative” at the Market Research Society conference, as well as featured by Nature News (and several German news outlets).

To slow down climate change, speed up gender equity?

On behalf of my coauthors Eugenia Bajet Mestre, Corinne Post, and Winfried Ruigrok, we’re delighted to share our new article on the nexxus between gender/diversity, leadership, and sustainability.

Gender equity and environmental sustainability may seem like unrelated issues, but research shows that they are in fact closely intertwined. Women and other underserved groups are disproportionately impacted by the global climate crisis, but they are also uniquely positioned to lead the fight for sustainability. We offer six strategies to help business and political leaders empower women and address environmental challenges through an intersectional approach to sustainability. To tackle climate change (as well as the myriad other sustainability challenges that face today’s organizations), we argue that leaders must acknowledge the complexity and interconnectedness of these issues — and work to develop integrated solutions that will improve them all.

Artwork accompanying our article in HBR by the talented Lars Leetaru.

See here for the original article in Harvard Business Review (in English).

See here for the television interview with Jamie Gloor in TVO (in German).

We’re delighted to see our work featured as “Strategic Intelligence” by the World Economic Forum and gaining above-average traction for Harvard Business Review articles with 22,000+ hits after only 1 month published.

But what do you think? Share your comments here—let’s keep the discussion going as we aim for awareness and positive impact in the areas of gender/diversity, leadership, and (social) sustainability.

Harvard Features 'Fix the Game-Not the Dame'!

I'm very excited and honored to announce that some of my ideas are getting some air thanks to Harvard and the Gender Action Portal, a curated collection of causal evidence to reduce social and economic inequality for women. I've summarized the paper below and included a link to the Harvard summary. Looking forward to your thoughts and continuing the gender equality conversation!

Fix the game, not the dame:
A team gender approach to leadership equality

Across the globe, stereotypical beliefs about good leadership are largely gendered in favor of men. That is, men are evaluated as having more leadership potential than women, and men are evaluated as better leaders than women-even when performing the same leadership behaviors. Similarly, local stereotypes typically also converge in men’s favor due to the masculinity and male majority of many managerial positions. In other words, men comprise the majority of leadership positions, a gender gap that grows with increasing hierarchy, which reinforces stereotypical beliefs about men and women’s leadership.  

However, leaders are not stand-alone actors-they can also be conceptualized as extensions of the group. For example, a CEO is also an employee of the company. If this proposition is true, then beyond leaders’ own gender or their gender match with individual followers, team members’ evaluations of their leaders may depend on how representative he or she is viewed to be of the group. Given the aforementioned gender biases, the growing numbers of women in entry-level and middle management positions, and the fact that gender is one of the most quickly recognized social categories, my colleagues and I tested this idea in 70 newly created teams of 927 students with leaders (more senior students) from business and economics in Switzerland.

Together with Professor Backes-Gellner and Dr. Manuela Morf, we randomly assigned male and female leaders to male majority (approximately 20% women) or more gender balanced (40-50% women) teams. After leaders underwent 2 days of leadership training and then spent approximately 6 hours with their teams, we asked team members to rate how exemplary their leader was, including showing the traits and behaviors of a leader. As expected, in male majority teams, both male and female team members rated male leaders as more exemplary than the female leaders. However, this effect was completely eliminated in more gender balanced teams. Importantly, there were also no differences in leaders’ own evaluations of their exemplifying a leader according to their team gender.

Thus, intervening at the local, team level can trump the more global, societal biases in the case of gender and leadership. Our findings are especially important given the lack of evidence that leadership training is effective or transfers to the workplace. Furthermore, female leaders often face social backlash for being too masculine or inauthentic when emulating more masculine leadership behaviors. If other organizational constraints prevent teams from being organized according to gender, managers should seek to incorporate the gender composition of leaders’ teams in their performance evaluations or 360 ratings. Finally, other more deep-level traits might also be important for team members’ benchmarking their leaders’ representativeness of the group over time (e.g., values).

Check it out here!