One thing about sharing an uncommon name with a former presidential candidate — you get drawn into a lot more political conversations with strangers. And during last year’s campaign, these converstions and the discourse at large repeatedly showed me that we still have trouble talking about what “female leadership” really is.

To put it bluntly, we don’t talk about female leaders in the same way we talk about male leaders. In defining the qualities of a good leader, we’ve historically looked for “agentic” traits, or traits that arise from individual agency like “decisiveness” and “strength” and “assertiveness.” Probably because our leaders have largely been male, we’ve coded these traits as being inherently “masculine.” On the flip side, there’s plenty of research showing that we tend to view communal leadership styles that emphasize cooperation and empathy as female and less desirable, including the 2018 study “The Power of Language: Gender, Status, and Agency in Performance Evaluations,” published in the journal Sex Roles.

I’d argue that, especially in a collaborative art form like opera, the exact opposite is true. A communal leadership style is just as valuable as an agentic one, and it is important for us to separate these traits from their stereotyped associations with gender.

This isn’t as easy as it might sound. There simply aren’t as many women as men in comparable leadership positions, and those who are there have often attained these positions using a more agentic, or masculine-coded, style. A recent study, pithily titled “Unequal Opera-tunities: Gender Inequality and Non-Standard Work in U.S. Opera Production,” published in Equality, Diversity, and Inclusion: An International Journal in 2024, found that at Budget 1 opera companies, only 5% of conductors and 15% of stage directors were women, and artistic leadership at these companies was less than 2% female. The percentages are higher at smaller companies but still do not reach parity.

“The Power of Language” study I mentioned before tells us that this is likely because female leaders are evaluated negatively for possessing communal leadership traits, while male leaders are not.

In the opera world, hiring decisions depend heavily on word of mouth. As freelancers and contract employees, even those in leadership positions like conductors and stage directors build a career by working at many different companies, rather than building a record of good work in one place. Maintaining visibility and good word of mouth through assertive self-promotion and reputation management — agentic qualities! — is necessary to advance.

To illustrate this point, I conducted my own small pilot survey over social media and in a working group of professional opera singers. I asked about 20 participants to think of an arts leader, a conductor, and a stage director and to describe them. I then asked them to specifically name and describe female arts leaders, conductors, and directors.

There were a couple of interesting takeaways. First, women were more likely to name female arts leaders, conductors, and directors when not specifically prompted to do so. Second, I performed a Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) — now considered the gold standard for analyzing language data — analysis on the descriptions of each arts leader.

I found that, while both male and female leaders of arts organizations were described using a mix of agentic and communal words, positive descriptions of female leaders used more agentic words — long associated with masculinity — overall, and positive descriptions of male leaders used more communal words — long associated with femininity — which is a similar result to research from the business world. The imbalance is greatest between the male and female heads of arts organizations. But it’s also striking that there’s such a large difference between how male and female conductors and stage directors are described.

Agentic and Communal Traits in Arts Leaders

My survey isn’t statistically significant, of course, but it should be seen as the beginning of a larger conversation. If we look at the traits we have codified as “female” leadership styles, they emphasize collaboration and cooperation.

In an art form that relies on collaboration for its production, it seems logical that this style should be universally beneficial for effective leadership. And yet, while my respondents did value communal leadership positively in male leaders, particularly stage directors, they positively valued agentic traits in female leaders.

Put another way, it’s possible that female leaders in the opera field may receive negative evaluations for the same communal style that elevates their male colleagues, as studies in the business world have found. And this may be part of what is holding female leaders — and therefore the field itself — back from embracing true gender equity.