Any female advantage in leadership style might be offset by disadvantage that flows from
prejudice and discrimination directed against women as leaders. Prejudice consists of unfair
evaluation of a group of people based on stereotypical judgments of the group rather than the
behavior or qualifications of its individual members. When people hold stereotypes about a
group, they expect members of that group to possess characteristics and exhibit behavior
consistent with those stereotypes. Perceivers then tacitly assimilate information to their
gender-stereotypic expectations
(von Hippel, Sekaquaptewa, & Vargas, 1995)
and sponta-
neously fill in unknown details of others’ behavior to conform to those expectations
(Dunning
& Sherman, 1997)
. These stereotypic inferences yield prejudice against individual group
members when stereotypes about their group are incongruent with the attributes associated
with success in certain classes of social roles. This incongruity tends to produce discrim-
ination by lowering evaluation of such group members as potential or actual occupants of
those roles