Beyond Increased Representation: The Social Influence of Expert Women

Various organizations and workplaces around the world are responding to the emerging research on the barriers faced by women in their work and social lives. In this area of research, increasing the number of women who are experts as well as addressing factors that perpetuate gender inequalities (e.g., unconscious biases) have shown to create more gender-equal spaces. In contrast, research that explicitly focuses on the various effects of gender on the selection of role models in novel learning situations is limited. In this talk, I present experimental evidence from diverse samples of women and men showing that, when learning a new task, beliefs about gender inequalities affect how much novices learn from expert women versus expert men. This work reveals that while women may be better represented, gender-based beliefs have the potential to diminish the social influence of expert women, particularly among novice men.