People’s ideal leader isn’t hyper-masculine — new study shows preference for androgynous traits

People tend to think of leaders as assertive, dominant, and unemotional—traits long associated with traditional male stereotypes. But what happens when people are asked to imagine the ideal leader, rather than the typical one? A new study published in Psychology of Women Quarterly suggests that ideal leadership traits are more balanced than commonly assumed.

Past research has shown that the stereotype of a “typical leader” is overwhelmingly masculine, emphasizing agency over communality. But those traits include both positive attributes like competence and negative ones like arrogance and domineering behavior. In contrast, little is known about how people envision the ideal leader, or whether that ideal shifts based on gendered cues such as the leader’s gender or the gender composition of their staff.

“I’ve been studying gendered leadership cognitions for a fairly long time, starting in my first year of graduate school, and it is a topic that I continue to feel passionate about,” said study author Andrea Vial, an assistant professor at New York University Abu Dhabi and director of the Social Roles & Beliefs Lab.

“I’m stunned by the continued scarcity of women in top leadership roles, despite the substantial gains women have made over the past six or seven decades in terms of educational accomplishments and labor market participation. I’m also stunned time and time again when high profile women with excellent qualifications and relevant experience get sidelined in favor of a man who is nowhere nearly as qualified, and I want to understand how our beliefs about gender and our beliefs about leadership roles contribute to these biases.

“I see my research in this area as building towards a future in which leadership and gender are not so tightly tangled in people’s minds, and where society can benefit from outstanding leaders coming from all corners.”

The researchers conducted two preregistered experiments with over 1,300 participants. In both studies, participants were asked to imagine an ideal leader for a company and “purchase” traits for this leader using a limited budget. This method forced participants to make choices between desirable attributes, revealing which qualities they viewed as essential versus optional.

The researchers focused on three key dimensions: competence (e.g., capable, intelligent), assertiveness (e.g., ambitious, self-reliant), and communality (e.g., warm, trustworthy). They also assessed preferences for avoiding negative traits, such as arrogance and cynicism, compared to avoiding low-agency traits like shyness or naivete.

In the first study, participants were presented with a scenario involving a steel manufacturing company—a context likely perceived as male-typed—and were randomly assigned to imagine either a male or female leader. Using three rounds of trait allocation under progressively smaller budgets, participants showed a clear preference for competence over communality when resources were limited. On average, they spent two-thirds of their initial budget on competence traits.

However, assertiveness did not receive the same treatment. Participants allocated roughly equal amounts to assertiveness and communality, suggesting that assertiveness was not seen as more essential than warmth or sensitivity in an ideal leader.

“Leaders should first and foremost be highly competent, there’s no question about that,” Vial told PsyPost. “Our studies find this competence premium, but they also show that people want leaders to be communal: to care about others, to be kind to others, to be cooperative. And these are traits we associate with women much more than with men.”

When it came to avoiding negative traits, people strongly preferred to eliminate characteristics like arrogance and controlling behavior rather than traits associated with low agency. This suggests that, although some aggressive traits are often tolerated in male leaders, people do not view them as part of an ideal leadership profile.

“When asked to choose between traits like assertiveness or dominance and traits like kindness and integrity, our studies show that people tend to gravitate toward the latter, or at least want these attributes to be well-balanced,” Vial said.

Interestingly, participants held these ideals regardless of whether they were envisioning a male or female leader. Contrary to predictions drawn from gender role theory, the ideal woman leader was not expected to be more communal than the ideal man leader. In fact, both were expected to be competent, moderately assertive, and not domineering. This finding contradicts the assumption that female leaders are held to different standards of warmth or kindness compared to their male counterparts—at least when considering ideals rather than real-world evaluations.

“We had anticipated that people might want female leaders in particular to ideally be communal rather than dominant, and we were a bit surprised not to find much of a difference between people’s notions of ideal female leaders and ideal male leaders,” Vial said. “In fact, we sometimes found that people wanted male leaders to be ideally more communal than dominant.”

In the second study, the researchers introduced another contextual variable: the gender makeup of the leader’s staff. Participants were told the staff consisted of either mostly men or mostly women, allowing the researchers to test whether communal traits would be prioritized more when the leader would be managing women. Again, participants strongly prioritized competence over communality, regardless of staff gender composition. Assertiveness and communality were valued about equally.

However, there was modest evidence that participants placed slightly more emphasis on communal traits when the staff was mostly women, aligning with cultural assumptions that women prefer kinder or more supportive leadership styles.

The researchers also explored whether people’s own roles in the workplace influenced their leadership ideals. Participants who identified as managers were more likely to prioritize assertiveness in female leaders compared to male leaders, possibly as a way of compensating for stereotypes that women lack assertiveness.

On the other hand, non-managers placed greater emphasis on communality when imagining leaders of predominantly female teams. These exploratory findings suggest that leadership ideals may be shaped not only by the leader’s characteristics but also by the social identity and professional experience of the observer.

Across both experiments, one result remained consistent: traits associated with “dark” agency, such as arrogance or dominance, were strongly rejected in ideal leaders. Participants allocated significantly more of their limited budget to avoiding these negative traits than to avoiding traits associated with low agency. This finding held true regardless of whether the leader was male or female, suggesting a broad consensus that tyrannical or manipulative behavior is incompatible with good leadership.

The researchers interpret these findings as evidence that leadership ideals are more aspirational and gender-balanced than descriptive stereotypes of actual leaders. While competence continues to be viewed as non-negotiable, traits associated with interpersonal warmth are valued as much as—if not more than—assertiveness. In this sense, the ideal leader profile deviates from the hyper-masculine norm and embraces a blend of traditionally male and female traits.

“The studies show that people’s ideas of what would make someone a great leader (the ‘ideal’ leader) align with ideas of women more than previously thought,” Vial told PsyPost. “As a whole, our studies reveal that the ingredients that make someone an ‘ideal leader’ are high doses of competence, communal and dominant traits in equal measure, and avoiding negative aspects of agency (like arrogance). This notion that people’s mental picture of an ideal leader is in alignment with the way people see women may encourage aspiring female leaders, who are often concerned about how others will view them (given that the typical leader is masculine).”

Still, the study has limitations. While the budget allocation method offers a more realistic way to assess trade-offs between desirable traits, it cannot fully capture the complexity of real-world leadership judgments. People may respond differently when evaluating actual leaders they work with or observe in the media. Also, the scenarios in the study focused on generalized leadership roles and did not account for variation across different industries, cultural settings, or leadership challenges.

Future research could expand on these findings by examining how leadership ideals shift in female-dominated professions or by exploring how race and ethnicity intersect with gender to influence leadership expectations. The authors also suggest looking more closely at the role of workplace culture—particularly environments dominated by masculine norms—and how that might shape both leadership ideals and evaluations of men and women in positions of authority.

“I want to shed further light on the boundaries of our tendency to think of leaders as ‘masculine men,'” Vial explained. “Social psychological research on gendered leadership cognitions has a long history, but we’ve barely scratched the surface and we need to extend our inquiry to contexts that are under investigated (e.g., leadership cognitions in female-typed occupational contexts), leader attributes that are not usually studied (e.g., negative aspects of agency, morality component of communality), and intersectional leader identities.”

“Another critical long-term goal is to investigate the role of workplace culture in shaping gendered leadership cognitions, gender gaps in leadership aspiration, and perceptions of male and female leaders. There is a surge in research (including my own) looking at the way that workplace culture can become imbued with gender role norms (e.g., masculine workplace norms or feminine workplace norms), influencing employee behavior, affect, cognition, and motivation, and contributing to gender gaps in interest and participation.”

“Some of this research has found, for example, an association between strong masculinity workplace norms and toxic leadership,” Vial continued. “I want to further examine how gendered workplace cultures influence how leaders behave, what people expect and want from leaders, and how these perceptions in turn may contribute to gender gaps in leadership in male-typed and female-typed occupational contexts.”

The study, “What an Ideal Leader Should (and Shouldn’t) Be Like: Gendered Prescriptions and Proscriptions for Leaders,” was authored by Andrea C. Vial and Fabiola A. M. Dorn.