Judgement of leadership competence : An experiment on the effects of gender stereoptypes on the judgement of leadership competence

Abstract

There are still few women in the maritime industry, especially in leadership position.This is believed to be caused by second generationbias, which is based on gender stereotypes. The aim of this thesis was to find out if the maritime industry judge leadership competence based on gender stereotypes.The questionnaire was designed based on the Goldberg paradigm where the independent variables were male, female,and gender neutral leaders. 247 people from the maritime industry participated in the research. None of the hypotheses showed any significant results. Meaning that therew as no reliable evidence to suggest whether the maritime industry do or do not judge leadership competence based on gender stereotypes.