The HBR Diversity and Inclusion Collection (5 Books)

Women and the Vision Thing

by Herminia Ibarra and Otilia Obodaru

MANY BELIEVE THAT BIAS AGAINST women lingers in the business world, particularly when it comes to evaluating their leadership ability. Recently, we had a chance to see whether that assumption was true. In a study of thousands of 360-degree assessments collected by Insead’s executive education program over the past five years, we looked at whether women actually received lower ratings than men. To our surprise, we found the opposite: As a group, women outshone men in most of the leadership dimensions measured. There was one exception, however, and it was a big one: Women scored lower on “envisioning”—the ability to recognize new opportunities and trends in the environment and develop ...