A new study from Dr. Amy Diehl, the Chief Information Officer at Wilson College and a Gender Equity Researcher, finds that women in leadership face ageism at every age.
Diehl says her team used data from 913 female business leaders for the research, "the first woman would say, 'I was told I'm too young to be a leader.' The next woman would say, 'I was told I'm too old, to be advanced.' And then the third woman would say, 'well, middle-aged women are not considered as old, so I'm not considered for leadership either.''
"So what we've discovered, there is no right age to be a woman-leader according to societal perceptions," says Diehl of her study with Leanne Dzubinski and Amber Stephenson.
Diehl says some women face, "role-incredulity", a term she and her research partners coined, for a situation where a woman in a leadership position or high-level executive role, "is mistaken for being in a secretarial role, or administrative assistant role, or another supportive role."
The study was published in the Harvard Business Review.
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