Previous research has demonstrated that social stereotypes associated with women's gender can preclude them from leadership positions. It remains unclear whether these stereotypes affect how people perceive male and female leaders, however. To examine people's stereotypes, we extracted their mental representations of male and female leaders and typical men/women (referred to as nonleaders) using reverse correlation. We then asked perceivers to rate these prototypes’ apparent leadership ability and traits related to power and warmth across contexts that represented typically masculine, feminine, or neutral domains. Leaders in a feminine context appeared more leaderlike than nonleaders, but as equally leaderlike in neutral and masculine contexts. Moreover, female leader faces appeared more powerful than female nonleader faces but male leader and nonleader faces appeared equally powerful. Male leaders were perceived as warmer than male nonleaders, however, whereas female leaders and nonleaders were perceived as equally warm. Thus, people’s gender, social stereotypes, and the context in which leaders are judged influence how people conceive of male and female leaders, with counterstereotypical attributes distinguishing leaders within their gender.

先前的研究表明，与女性性别相关的社会刻板印象会阻止她们担任领导职务。然而，尚不清楚这些刻板印象是否会影响人们对男性和女性领导者的看法。为了检查人们的刻板印象，我们使用反向相关提取了他们对男性和女性领导者以及典型男性/女性（称为非领导者）的心理表征。然后，我们要求感知者对这些原型的明显领导能力以及与权力和热情相关的特征进行评分，这些特征跨越通常代表男性、女性或中性领域的背景。女性化背景下的领导者比非领导者更像领导者，但在中性和男性化背景下表现得同样领导者。而且，女性领导者的面孔比女性非领导者的面孔显得更有力量，但男性领导者和非领导者的面孔似乎同样强大。然而，男性领导者被认为比男性非领导者更温暖，而女性领导者和非领导者被认为同样温暖。因此，人们的性别、社会刻板印象和领导者被评判的背景会影响人们对男性和女性领导者的看法，而反刻板印象的属性则可以区分领导者的性别。