Despite the proactive efforts of many firms to combat gender bias within their organizations, societal prejudices still disadvantage women leaders and the firms who employ them. This external gender bias shapes outside stakeholder evaluations of women leaders’ efforts in various ways, and firms need strategies to cope with this external gender bias. We examine the conditions that might alleviate this burden of external bias and what women leaders and top executives can do to leverage these conditions—from a strategic positioning perspective—that will effectively allow female leaders to differentiate their work. To do this, we synthesize and build upon evidence that the external gender bias against women leaders diminishes when they lead in areas that are unconventional rather than mainstream. We then propose a two-step process based on (1) identifying the likely threat of external gender bias, which is stronger in some industry contexts than others, and (2) leveraging unconventionality to circumvent male prototypical comparisons, thereby reducing the hazards of external gender bias.

尽管许多公司积极努力打击其组织内的性别偏见，但社会偏见仍然使女性领导者和雇用她们的公司处于不利地位。这种外部性别偏见以各种方式塑造了外部利益相关者对女性领导者努力的评估，公司需要战略来应对这种外部性别偏见。我们研究了可能减轻这种外部偏见负担的条件，以及女性领导者和高层管理人员可以做些什么来利用这些条件——从战略定位的角度来看——这将有效地让女性领导者区分他们的工作。为此，我们综合并建立证据表明，当女性领导者在非常规而非主流领域发挥领导作用时，对女性领导者的外部性别偏见会减少。