Breaking down the barriers to women’s leadership and entrepreneurship

Looking beyond appearances and biases to produce effective solutions

The research program Anne Boring and Maxime Marzin initiated consists in three strands: research, teaching and knowledge dissemination. So far, three research projects have started, to try and answer the following questions: what types of skills are women encouraged to adopt in the workplace to reach leadership positions? Are women learning the skills that will matter in the future? What are the specificities and constraints that women entrepreneurs face? These projects fall within the framework of two overarching research objectives: to conduct a review of the main reasons why there are few women in entrepreneurship and in leadership positions and to work on getting a better understanding of the skills that would be necessary for women to acquire at the higher education level. The Chair’s findings will be fed into the creation of training courses, at Sciences Po, of course, but also in other universities and contexts. The results, as well as the training material, will be disseminated as much as possible, notably through the creation of a dedicated website.

As Dr Boring remarks, "some of the advice that is presently given to women is not based on actual research. Recommendations can be based on biases or clichés that aren’t true. For instance, people tend to think the reason why women don’t have the same working and payment conditions as men is because they don’t negotiate. Thus, one common advice they are given is to learn to negotiate. However, a recent study showed that when women try it, they can be perceived negatively and thus sanctioned. Social and environmental norms complicate things. We need to change the idea that it’s women’s fault if they don’t get equal treatment."

Start-ups, particularly in the Tech industry, are redefining the labor market of the future. But in places like America’s Silicon Valley, women are grossly underrepresented, in the order of 10%. Such observations call for urgent action. The comprehensive and large-scale research program led by Dr Anne Boring aims to provide unprecedented insight into the obstacles to gender equality still rampant in our societies. "My personal hope is that the Chair will succeed in capturing the information that we lack and that we need to enable women to unleash their true potential, the head of the chair summarizes. We aim to train women to be prepared for the obstacles that they will encounter, teach them to react in a way that will defuse the discrimination they are likely to encounter. This way, we can give them the means to show that they are just as competent as men, and to obtain the positions and the salaries they deserve. We also want to help organizations reduce the impact of biases and discrimination in the workplace. "

Learn more about Anne Boring's research project

Barriers to Women in Employment and Leadership