Tuck Business School | What Oprah and Xi Jinping can teach us about status and power

by Kirk Kardashian
November 19, 2024

Assistant Professor of Business Administration at Tuck, Sonya Mishra teaches leadership of various organizations in the MBA program.

The individuals on the “most powerful people” list were predominantly men, and those men were almost exclusively world leaders (like Vladimir Putin) and CEOs (like Jamie Dimon). The “Most Influential Women” list, however, had a strong representation of women in the entertainment industry, such as Beyoncé, Oprah Winfrey and Taylor Swift.

It got them thinking. The word “powerful” appeared in the title of each ranking, but the rankings categorized different types of power. While Oprah is certainly powerful, is she as powerful as Xi Jinping, the Chinese president? Not really. Oprah is rich and famous and has millions of fans. Xi Jinping controls a country of 1.4 billion people. Xi Jinping certainly fits the traditional definition of power – possessing control of valuable resources. Mishra and his colleagues felt that Oprah had something different: status, which is defined in academic literature as being respected in the eyes of others.

After identifying this gap in the “most powerful” lists between men, who held real power, and women, who had more status, Mishra, Townsend and Kray designed a study to further explore the connection between gender and social hierarchy. Their article was recently published in Psychological sciences and is titled “Not All Powerful People Are Created Equal: An Examination of Gender and Pathways to Social Hierarchy Through the Lens of Social Cognition.”

In the interview below, which has been condensed and edited for clarity, Mishra explains the research, its findings, and takeaways for companies trying to create more equitable workplaces.

How did you probe the stereotypes that underpin conceptions of power and status?

In our first study, we collected photos of people on the “Most Influential People” and “Most Influential Women” lists, showed them to hundreds of study participants, and asked them if they recognized them. Once we had their response, we told them who the people on the list were. We then asked participants to rate each person's power or status. They would rate the person's power by answering a question such as “Indicate the extent to which this person controls valuable resources on a scale of 1 to 7” or “Indicate the extent to which this person is highly respected in society.” The second question is more about status. What we found was that among these powerful people, women had higher perceived status than men, but men had higher perceived power than women. Additionally, men who had power were much more likely to be recognized than those with status. For women, it was their status that predicted their recognition, not their power.

What about women on the “most powerful people” list, like Mary Barra, the CEO of General Motors, or Angela Merkel, the former German chancellor?

Yes, these were some of the women who controlled the resources, holding power in the traditional sense. They were simply less likely to be household names than women with higher status.

If not, how does this stereotype manifest in society?

This is what we wanted to know in our second study. In this study, we collected three different metrics for all targets in the Powerful People and Powerful Women lists: their media mentions and the number of followers they had on X (formerly Twitter) and Instagram. We found that for women, the more status they had, the more followers they had and the more they were talked about in the media. For men, the more power they had, the more they were mentioned in the media and the more they were followed. So we were capturing the way society was attracted to these men in power and women of status. This could mean that we, as perceivers, have this preference that we prefer women with status and men with power, rather than the other way around.

Why do you think we tend to associate women with status and men with power?

I studied this question in a article released in 2022. I found that status is seen as more feminine than power because there is a stereotype that women are other-oriented. And to achieve and maintain status, you have to pay attention to the people around you and make sure you're doing things that earn their respect. Power is different. You receive power from a certain entity, and once you have it, you no longer need to rely on others. So, because status is more other-oriented, perhaps when people see women in status positions, it confirms stereotypes. Since we, as perceivers, pay more attention to information that fits stereotypes, then we are more attentive to women with status and men with power.

Do women internalize this stereotype?

This is something we address in the third study of our new article. We asked men and women how they perceived themselves in terms of power and status, through an implicit association test. We found that women associated themselves more with status than with power, while men did not differentiate between the two. It seems that women identify with the status because, perhaps, on some level they know it's a safer bet for them. In my 2022 article, I find that when women appear to be seeking power, they are more likely to experience backlash and be seen as unpleasant than when they are seeking status.

So it seems that this connection we have between women and their status could limit the type of power that women aspire to.

Yes, absolutely. Power is very material and more tangible than status. If Forbes says that some women are the most powerful women in the world, but in reality they just have high status, we don't recognize women who have power in the traditional sense. When we pay more attention to high-status women than to high-power women, we essentially lock women into a much more diffuse and shifting form of influence, in that status is taken away from them more easily than power.

Given your findings, what advice do you have forWhich companies want to hire more women in positions of power?

Thus, many leadership positions are characterized by both high power and high status. But if organizations put more emphasis on the “respect” aspect, they may be able to attract more women who want leadership roles, but don't want to deal with the backlash associated with appearing “seeking.” power “. In a follow-up paper, I also find that men are more likely to support diversity initiatives aimed at increasing the proportion of women in leadership positions when they are framed as “increasing women's access to highly respected positions.”

How do you think we can combat these stereotypes, rather than just work around them?

This is something I struggle with all the time. These stereotypes are deeply rooted in society. But research has shown that the more people you are exposed to who go against stereotypes, the less entrenched your stereotype becomes. Forbes might be doing a disservice to society by pretending that these high-ranking women are powerful. They should really highlight women who have a lot of power: women who are CEOs and world leaders. The more we are conditioned to see women in positions of power, the stronger our association between women and power becomes. Maybe that's the long term plan, and in the short term we can phrase the language a little differently. In fact, why not do both at the same time?

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