Andrea Schneider has two fascinating new papers on SSRN.  In different ways, both papers deal with what Andrea and her coauthers label the “double bind” facing women in leadership positions: “The incongruence of the core feminine stereotype with managerial effectiveness can result in women being perceived as competent but unlikable, or as likable but incompetent.”  The first paper, “Negotiating Your Public Identity: Women’s Path to Power,” illustrates the two options using two female politicians with clearly established public images: Hillary Clinton’s persona illustrates “competent but unlikable,” while Sarah Palin’s exemplifies “likable but incompetent.”  (As I suggested in an earlier post, some of the criticisms of Sonia Sotomayor as lacking “judicial temperament” may owe something, à la Hillary, to the “competent but unlikable” stereotype.)

Andrea and her coauthors offer a humorous, but also disheartening, review of media coverage from the 2008 election that typecast Clinton and Palin into their respective roles.  They also discuss social scientific research suggesting that the double bind arises from deeply entrenched gender stereotypes.  They conclude more hopefully, however, with suggested strategies for professional women to minimize the harmful effects of the double bind.

The second paper, “Women at the Bargaining Table: Pitfalls and Prospects,” presents some of these suggestions in more detail, with particular attention to the implications for teachers of negotiation. 

Here is the abstract:

Research evidence across a number of disciplines and fields has shown that women can encounter both social and financial backlash when they behave assertively, for example, by asking for resources at the bargaining table. But this backlash appears to be most evident when a gender stereotype that prescribes communal, nurturing behavior by women is activated. In situations in which this female stereotype is suppressed, backlash against assertive female behavior is attenuated. We review several contexts in which stereotypic expectations of females are more dormant or where assertive behavior by females can be seen as normative. We conclude with prescriptions from this research that suggest how women might attenuate backlash at the bargaining table and with ideas about how to teach these issues of gender and backlash to student populations in order to make students, both male and female, more aware of their own inclination to backlash and how to rectify such inequities from both sides of the bargaining table.

The first paper appears as a chapter in Rethinking Negotiation Teaching: Innovations for Context and Culture (2009), while the second is published at 25 Negotiation Journal 233 (2009).