Gender and leadership perceptions among African Americans

Guided by Eagly's (1987) social role theory and Fiske's (1993) model of status effects in dyads, we studied leadership perceptions within and between gender among African American college students engaged in a problem solving task. Variance components in leadership judgments replicated the pattern of findings reported by Malloy and Janowski (1992), and extended them by showing more consensus in leadership judgments of men by both men and women. Furthermore, there was more consensus in women's judgments of men than in men's judgments of women, and men more accurately predicted how they were judged by women than by men. Reliable self-other agreement of leadership judgments was only observed for men (self) when judged by women. Results revealed a gender bias in leadership perceptions among African Americans that is similar to that observed among European Americans, and were more consistent with a gender inequality model than with a gender equality model.