Robert Livingston, Northwestern: Is Agentic Backlash Inevitable?: A Nuanced Examination of Agency and How it Affects Black and White Women Leaders

The following are notes from Robert Livingston's presentation at the HBS Gender & Work Conference, February 28, 2013.
Gender in organizations: A matter of rank? Women and minorities not underrepresented at lower ranks, but are in upper ranks.

13 Fortune 500 CEOs women (2013); first woman CEO was Katherine Graham, a position she inherited from her father. 12 Fortune 500 CEOs are Black, Ursula Burns first female, 2009.

Agency penalty for appearing too assertive, angry, or self-promoting; violation of prescriptive stereotypes (Rudman, 1998). Women "should" be warm. Ann Hopkins: Double-bind; defied descriptive stereotype of incompetence but also prescriptive stereotype of warmth.

Does backlash apply to all women leaders?


  • Additive predition: Black female = Black + female
  • Intersectional predition: Black female ≠ Black + female


Intersectionality can produce certain advantages by marginalizing Black women to the point of irrelevance.

Stereotypes of Black women are quite different from stereotypes of White women.

Prescriptive and descriptive stereotypes (Hall et al., 2012): dominance okay in Black women, not in Black men, least acceptable in White women, most in White men

Livingston, Rosette & Washington (2012 Psych Sci): Communal v. autocratic leadership, photo of White v. Black, man v. women. Ratings of perceptions of leaders along perceptions of status (admiration, salary, etc.). Black males rated more favorably when communal, less favorably when dominant, communality and agency d/n matter for White men; White women rated more highly if communal, low if dominant; Black women equally high for dominant and communal – in other words, Black women get away with the combination of communality and agency, like White men [as though the two negatives combine in a mulitiplicative than an additive way to create a positive].

Two different dimensions of agency: Assertiveness, or administrative agency; and Power seeking, or ambitious agency:
  1. administrative agency (getting it done)
  2. ambitious agency (getting ahead - power seeking)
[Similar to distinction between competence and dominance; the concept of "agency" is usually defined in masculine terms that combines competence and dominance. In Berdahl & Min (2012) we found that agency as a concept was distinguished between competence and dominance for racial stereotypes.]

Black women are stereotyped as administratively agentic, not ambitiously agentic.

Study: Described Black women as administratively agentic or ambitiously agentic. How much agency, communalism, is required in the role? How much money should they get paid? Only the ambitious agency role was seen as warranting more money than the administrative agency role.

To what extent would participants expect hostility from women, men, subordinates in a leadership role? Black women participants. Women rated administrative agency role as significantly more attractive to them than the ambitious agency role or the control role. Women expected the most backlash in the ambitious leadership role, not the administrative agency role (same as control, which was seen as more communal).

Type of agency matters: ambitious vs. administrative.

Black women face double jeopardy when they make a mistake (Rosette & Livingston, 2012).

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