Real Women, Real Leaders: Surviving and Succeeding in the Business World

A Study in Leadership: Women Do It Better Than Men

Zenger Folkman

Which gender supplies better leaders for organizations? Based on research conducted by Zenger Folkman, the authority in strengths-based leadership development, the answer is rather clear and quite shocking. As far as the sixteen researched differentiating leadership competencies are concerned, women excelled in a majority of areas.

Below is the research of a sample of 7,280 leaders who had their leadership effectiveness evaluated in 2011. Sixty-four percent of our data set was male (4,651) and 36 percent was female (2,629). The data represents managers and executives who completed our Extraordinary Leader 360 assessment in 2011. Our clients tend to be progressive, successful companies that have a strong belief in leadership development. This is not a global random sample of leaders, but rather a sampling of male and female leaders from high performing companies. Perhaps the differences are more pronounced in this data because the organizations supported the development of their leaders. It is also interesting because 64 percent of the data comes from managers and executives in the United States, and the remainder from countries scattered all over the world. Many of the countries in the data showed the same trends between men and women.

Males tended to have a higher percent of leaders in top management and reports to top management positions.

Overall Leadership Effectiveness by Gender by Position (*Percentile Scores) ...