Compared to their representation in the workforce, women are significantly underrepresented in leadership roles in the United States. Whereas substantial research attention has been paid to the role of bias and discrimination in perpetuating this gap, less has been devoted to exploring the gender difference in aspirations for these roles. We draw from social role theory to hypothesize that men have higher leadership aspirations than women and test our hypothesis using a meta-analysis of 174 U.S. published and unpublished samples (N = 138,557) spanning six decades. The results reveal that there is a small but significant gender difference in the predicted direction (Hedge's g = 0.22). Notably, the gender difference has not narrowed significantly over time, and appears to widen at college age and among working adults within male-dominated industries. Our results also suggest that the process and dissemination of research in this domain exhibits bias. We discuss the implications of our conclusions for future research.

与她们在劳动力中的代表性相比，女性在美国担任领导职务的人数明显不足。尽管大量研究关注偏见和歧视在使这种差距永久化方面的作用，但很少致力于探索这些角色期望中的性别差异。我们从社会角色理论中得出假设，男性比女性具有更高的领导抱负，并通过对 174 个美国已发表和未发表样本 ( N  = 138,557) 跨越 60 年的荟萃分析来检验我们的假设。结果表明，预测方向存在微小但显着的性别差异（Hedge's g = 0.22)。值得注意的是，性别差异并没有随着时间的推移而显着缩小，而且在大学年龄和男性主导行业的工作成年人中似乎有所扩大。我们的研究结果还表明，该领域研究的过程和传播存在偏见。我们讨论了我们的结论对未来研究的影响。