Who Gets to Lead? Gendered Perceptions of Women’s Executive Access in the United States

Despite decades of progress toward gender equality, women remain substantially underrepresented in executive leadership across the United States. This study examines how gendered perceptions and workplace discrimination shape beliefs about women’s access to top executive roles, drawing on nationally representative survey data from the Pew Research Center’s American Trends Panel (Wave 36; June–July 2018; N = 4,456 U.S. citizens). Chi-square tests, multivariable logistic regression, and three supervised machine-learning classifiers were used to identify predictors of the belief that executive access is easier for men. Women perceived executive access as more unequal than men (79.1% vs. 67.0%; p < .001), yet both groups showed comparable assessments of women’s leadership capability. Perceived workplace gender discrimination was the strongest predictor of the primary outcome (OR = 4.66; 95% CI 3.42–6.33), substantially mediating the direct effect of respondent gender once structural perceptions were held constant. Machine-learning benchmarks corroborated this finding, ranking workplace discrimination as the most important predictor across all three classifiers. It would appear, then, that interventions aimed at addressing structural factors, especially discrimination and pipelines, will prove more effective than attempts to change general attitudes concerning the competence of women.