In contemporary organizations, there are many contexts in which misogynistic leadership is observed – from corporate organizations, national political leadership, and sporting organizations. Over the years, many senior leaders have reported being marginalized, isolated, and abused. Misogynistic leadership has stirred concern about gender relations at work and the failure to manage disciplinary and bystander interventions sufficiently. This prevailing workplace challenge assumes that both misogynistic men and affected women are constantly occupying the news headlines.
This is symbolic of how the challenges of individual failing and frailty are frequently attributed to problems of personality. The third objective of this essay is to understand the nature and characteristics of misogynistic leadership and the impact on individuals, teams, and the wider organization. Supporting these objectives, first in the section responding to concepts of misogyny, we address the paucity of attributing misbehavior, sexual harassment, and bullying in workplaces to the actions of misogynists. Secondly, we explore the idea of misogynistic leadership, frequently subject to neglect by organizational researchers. Third and finally, we seek to address intersectionality, the interlocking relation of pervasive sexism and racism, which is largely absent from any form of inquiry, let alone misogynistic leadership.
While it is impossible to shed light on all facets of consensus regarding whether misogyny is an individual or a structural problem, this essay clearly provides a case for misogyny in the workplace to be understood as an outcome of individual personality. Misogynistic leaders are found across all sectors, industries, and organizational sizes. The following pages provide insights into the characteristics of misogynistic leadership as well as the impact on individuals, their colleagues, and the affected organizations.
By means of relevant literature, current examples, and personal reflections from women executives, we set the reader in the tough reality of misogynistic leadership, finally discussing the consequences for the organization, affected individuals, and society. We encourage researchers to take up the topic and hone this further. Numbers of women executives willing to share their stories have shown that it is untold too often. In fact, if such women just vent their workplace distress, they eventually remain isolated within the organizations and have surfaced as ‘litigious’ to digital media, but given no redress in their current organization. Such unfair remedies maintain the existing misogynistic and ethnocentric organizational culture in which leaders feel immune from justice or fairness, and where prejudiced stereotypes are propagated.
Definition of Misogynistic Leadership
Misogyny is an age-old discrimination against women. Even today, women are facing serious problems that not only violate their rights but also have an adverse effect on their career development. Misogynistic leadership is a kind of leadership where a person dislikes, fears, or is prejudiced against women. Misogynistic leadership behaviors include general disdain or contempt for women, avoidance of hiring women, or, if women are hired, then they may be kept in lower-level, dead-end jobs or reserved mostly for positions such as secretaries or schoolteachers.
Those with misogynistic attitudes also deny women promotion simply because of their gender and may feel that a father deserves a promotion or extra pay but not a mother, especially if she has small children, has given birth, or is pregnant. The attitudes underlying misogyny reflect a belief that women are biologically and socially less capable than men in traditionally ‘male’ roles or are taking a job from a more deserving man. Those who have a misogynistic attitude include an insistence that everyone in the work environment is ‘pro-female,’ ‘pro-women,’ and ‘anti-male,’ and the hostility these leaders have towards women.
Misogynistic leadership attitudes, behaviors, and organizational cultures are antithetical to equal treatment or equitable representation for women and suggest a commitment to maintaining a highly toxic, masculinized organizational environment. The failure to understand the roots of this cultural background and these attitudes is to mistake misogyny for competing models of leadership or incompatible styles of management. Undertaking an analysis under these assumptions may make it easier to overlook those misogynists. Leading organizations are the most responsible for addressing this issue. It is noticeable that those who practice misogynistic leadership and their organizational attitudes and conflicts are connected with women.
On the one hand, those studies pay attention to the work of women in organizational leaders’ interpretations of misogyny and are available. On the other hand, are they also trying to explain to women that leadership alone is an important factor in drawing attention to how practices and organizational attitudes, which are guided by misogyny and that are working to neutralize, are interconnected and striving for success?
One hallmark behavior of misogynistic leaders in organizations is the need to control. These individuals feel highly uncomfortable with change and do not like to be surprised. The need for control is also externalized behaviorally in a motivation to control other individuals through antisocial behavior. Misogynistic leaders exhibit Jekyll and Hyde style behavioral patterns, displaying a lack of empathy and persistent verbal or physical aggression in interpersonal relationships outside the workplace, but engaging in both in the workplace.
The intimidation of others is a way to not only inculcate obedience but also to take out their anger on other individuals who may be perceived as the source of their own negative emotions. These individuals might minimize or devalue the work contributed by females or feel entitled as if they have special rights strictly predicated on their sex. The grandiose side of the arrogant personality makes defeat, loss, and disappointment, whether personal or professional, unacceptable. Idealized delusions will aid the misogynist in being able to cope with inevitable feelings of frustration and inadequacy.
Furthermore, the misogynist may also suffer from grandiosity and obsession with power. Misogynistic leaders may be so obsessed with their own power that they might have difficulty developing other individuals or passing on their power or influence to the future generation of workers. This obsession with power and infallibility often leads to being in a class of their own, unable to wield or let go of power. Leaders who are roguish or rogue often are the product of this behavior pattern. A misogynistic leader that is thriving leads to the derogation of all others surrounding him. Misogynistic leaders believe that they are endowed with uncommon qualities, ones that make them unique in a field or setting typically crowded with undesirables.
Examples of Misogynistic Behaviors
Many female employees—real or fictional—could tell you about times that their male boss made a snide comment if she took a personal phone call in the middle of the day, but he didn’t say that to her male co-worker. They will often recall times that they were told to bring someone coffee or take out the trash, only to later walk in on said man taking a personal call at his desk. One employee, who worked for a county government for many years, remembers encountering a boss who would openly refer to women who worked for him as “girls” in front of other senior management in a very negative and derogatory tone of voice. She even caught him in a lie about research she did for him, in an attempt to discredit her because he couldn’t get his way in a discussion. As you can see, most of these behaviors may seem very innocent in nature; however, the point of this work is to demonstrate that although a comment or action may seem innocent when taken at face value, it is not so when you take into account the leadership culture that it fosters.
Some may argue that the example behaviors we are focusing on in this section are not real attempts to belittle females, but that they just lend to the creation of a hostile workplace, which is sexual harassment. However, we will demonstrate that these behaviors contribute to a culture of fear and drive individuals underground. This is when the male employee will go out of his way to work with other male counterparts, leaving his female counterparts unaware of decision-making and work procedures. If this behavior is exhibited by the leader, the opportunity for equal input will only extend to male workers as well.
Further, the hope for career advancement will be moved further out of reach for women than it is for men. Clearly, then, the behaviors can be seen as insidious. Thus, in recognition of the pervasiveness of leadership and the trickle-down effect that leadership has on an organization, it becomes imperative for future employees to train themselves on what to look for in a bad leader before they accept a position in that leader’s organization.
Impact of Misogynistic Leadership on Organizations
The impacts of misogynistic leadership on organizational health and effectiveness can be felt across many different domains, including areas such as teamwork and collaboration, creativity and innovation, employee morale, mental health and employee well-being, synergy, culture, and work engagement, all of which are negatively impacted. For example, when an organization has allowed a misogynistic workplace culture to become well established, the impact of such behavior – particularly when demonstrated by organizational leaders – can be quite considerable.
Many employees will seek to distance themselves from the misogynist, which results in employees checking out mentally and physically, leading to a lack of staff engagement and motivation and possibly leading to new staff turnover. This has further individual and organizational impacts as other employees will have to work harder to ensure that work is completed by staff that no longer care about their job. This disengagement can also destroy team dynamics, particularly when the misogynist is the leader of a team, as other team members are less likely to seek out their leader for feedback and assistance regarding issues of work that cause them concern and will soon stop talking to them altogether.
In addition, teams tend to be more susceptible to groupthink and are less likely to explore new or more effective ways of working as a complete team. The invisibility that many employees experience because of the behavior of the misogynist further ceases to challenge or flow through the organization and can lead to further damage to a company’s bottom line. Innovation, both formally and informally, is deeply affected where there is a misogynistic environment due to the lack of a variety of different opinions. In addition, because there is a lack of any conscientious behaviors displayed by a misogynistic organization and since this is linked to work performance, they can begin to have financial implications where companies can find it hard to recruit people due to bad press about how workers are treated. Even when talented individuals do join an organization that is misogynistic, there is generally an unsatisfactory experience in job engagement leading to unproductiveness – and further, the behavior of such staff often flows through to customers. In short, then, the repercussions of a poor organizational culture are wide-ranging.
By not only excluding women from promotions and career growth, but also going a step further and dismissing and demeaning women in roles of power or influence, misogynists deny accomplishments, information, and legitimacy, and ignore directions from those in roles they have excluded women from. This behavior is likely to reduce the legitimacy of the leader in the eyes of her subordinates. For those who can hold the uterus as an insult, it’s hard to take them seriously as a leader or supervisor. The misogyny further delegitimizes the leader. Only women with untainted male relationships are considered colleagues.
Decreased Morale and Employee Wellbeing The harassment and concerns for professionalism pose potential mental health and societal attention costs. Personal repercussions include higher stress and anxiety, burnout at a fast pace, and growing certainty of poor performance. Just as important are the implications for avoidance and physical/psychological disengagement from work, compensating with potential repercussions for job satisfaction and morale. Professional shortcomings may also manifest in member contributions and interactions with their teams, leading to negative workgroup dynamics.
In the long term, a culture that supports this behavior silently permits career impasse and stilted advancement for women. Certain management practices roil hostile workforces across industries and have exponential financial implications. The data are clear regarding the negative impact of high turnover. Turnover can cost firms months of an employee’s salary to replace that staffer. Testimonials from previous and current employees and health officials show these effects in a professional setting, which could be used to further study potential associations with misogynistic management.
Why Misogynistic Leaders are Dangerous
Misogynistic leaders are not just a nuisance; they are dangerous. Not only can they undermine diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts at an organization, but they can also endanger individual employees’ right to self-determination. Given the effects of this erosion of autonomy, the organization may experience consequences detrimental to their success, related to both the effort of diversifying and maintaining their non-diverse population. When actual or potential employees experience multiply marginalized individuals not being treated inclusively, it can have a negative impact on their motivation to apply for work at the organization. Similarly, employees can experience an exclusionary environment that results from the behavior of demarginalization efforts. This can lead to decreased job satisfaction and an increase in activism around changing these conditions.
Finally, prejudiced behavior in leaders can undermine the accumulation of multicultural intelligence, which is the knowledge about people from different cultural backgrounds one would accumulate if their group social identity, such as gender, were different from their own. Organizations succeed with diversity and inclusion, the theory goes, because diverse people provide diverse perspectives on problems and unique ideas about how to solve those shared problems. A leader who cannot or will not recognize the value in someone else’s unique experiences, understanding, knowledge, or ideas squanders the potential offered by diversity. Moreover, misogynistic leaders propel the accumulation of multicultural ignorance rather than intelligence in another way.
Organizations led by openly hostile misogynists suffer reputational damage, which can result in their actual and potential clients firing or refusing to hire them as service providers. As a result, the demarginalization that inclusive workplaces support as a window on marginalized worldviews or diverse perspectives closes. Because the leader is a bigot, the contributions of other employees are likely to be tainted with prejudice in the minds of actual and potential clients as well. The organization that employs a visible bigot may be tangentially tarnished by the bigot’s biased reputation.
Importantly, this behavior is not only personally harmful but socially problematic and requires collective agreements to change. Even if working for a misogynist leader is not technically illegal, it should be, and it must become a social and professional anathema if we seek to create organizations and industries that reflect values of equity and respect. In the next section, I hope to better explain exactly how leader mindsets inform and affect organizational makeup. In doing so, I aim to render a better picture of what is at stake apart from whether misogynistic leaders should keep their jobs.
The impact of misogynistic leadership can be found in the undermining effect it has on organizations already working toward increasing diversity and inclusivity among staff. Dominant social groups can stonewall or outright reject the ideas and suggestions of women and other marginalized groups when they are presented in the context of gender, diversity, or inclusion.
Members of devalued groups might be systematically overlooked for promotion because they are labeled as less capable. Misogynistic leadership can further delegitimize input from other team members in this vein, arguing that feminine perspectives are irrelevant, burdensome, or somehow fall outside of their leadership prerogatives. The misogynistic tension further extends into instances of more frequent verbal abuse and discrimination, which are illegal and are, in theory, handled by other parts of the organization. Such legal resolutions are solutions that already focus on small numbers of individuals. At our field sites, organizational efforts focused primarily on gender and race differences and efforts that included different goals, such as encouraging thought diversity, received less attention.
Consequently, the current view primarily signals the means by which a leader can directly influence or promote certain voices while neglecting the ways that a leader might influence organizational feedback in a more indirect, cumulative fashion over time. Ignoring broader capacities or practices also betrays an underlying assumption that diversity and inclusivity are more often the products of benign neglect rather than intentional leadership choices.
Independent of these key themes, it is also possible that the organization or an organization’s leadership may encourage the pursuit of certain topics not obviously known or discussed broadly with audiences. In these underlying tensions, we observe an audience’s simultaneous embrace and rejection of change: event attendees marginalized by their adherence to some group ideology favor enacting change yet also join in their event leader’s refusal of change. We capitalize on active leadership by exploring the ways in which leadership quality can be influenced by communicational leadership, which is not discussed in the literature but has been strongly encouraged in the context of gender studies settings and as a salient point of organizational consideration.
In the organizational literature, this essay has showcased the significant negative repercussions of misogynistic leadership. This phenomenon is insidious because it diminishes workplace effectiveness and erodes the health of employees. The essay has suggested a range of resources that organizations can use to promote healthy work cultures that reject despotic, patriarchal leaders. Most importantly, the essay has urged future action to go beyond pseudo-egalitarian normalizations of said leaders and into direct confrontation. This will necessitate a transformation in global societal norms that have, for centuries, devalued women.
Although the feminist movement has made immense strides toward equality, the patriarchal culture that placed despots in leadership positions still endures. Internally, organizations can engage in a range of actions to rectify the current state of leadership. For example, they can reformulate criteria for hiring executives and adopt a zero-tolerance harassment policy. In the future, I would urge organizations to make sure that all training emphasizes why despotism and misuse of social norms for self-gain are insidious. Reinforcing harsh social sanctions against such behavior and prompts for non-compliance with formal authority figures should motivate each individual to strive for full enlightenment. Lastly, this person-organization-environment fit can help internal socializations train leaders and followers toward interpersonal exchanges that are transformational rather than transactional. Innovation, personal development, and overall satisfaction over the course of one’s life are indeed possible in the face of a despotic and hostile societal environment.
