Leadership: are womenmore optimistic than men?

It’s true that women don’t behave the way men do. The work carried out by Chiara de Amicis, Professor of Finance and researcher at SKEMA Business School, reveals that, compared with men, the way women communicate is clearer and more positive, particularly in a financial context.

Chiara de Amicis
Professor of Finance and researcher,
SKEMA Business School

Do men and women have different leadership styles? Research has yet to provide a definitive answer to this question. It is a particularly important matter, as companies are being urged more than ever to increase the representation of women in management positions. Most studies agree that there are behavioural differences between men and women senior managers. For example, women tend to be more sensitive to ethical issues, and to focus on corporate environmental and social responsibility (Post et al., 2011; Atif et al., 2020). Female executives are also associated with more conservative accounting practices (Ho et al., 2015) and a lower risk of fraud involving securities (Cumming et al., 2015).

In our research, we studied how companies communicate information in order to pinpoint any differences according to their managers’ gender. Recent academic research shows that the style and affective range of corporate communications convey signals to investors that are relevant in terms of values (Tetlock et al. 2008; Price et al. 2012), and that certain managerial characteristics have an impact on the form of corporate disclosures (Davis et al. 2015).

Nearly 78,000 calls analysed

Our recent publication, Sentiment Analysis and Gender Differences in Earnings Conference Calls (De Amicis, Falconieri, and Tastan 2021), demonstrates for the first time ever that there are language differences between male and female managers in conference calls about results: one of the most common forms of transmitting voluntary information, where executives discuss company performance and answer questions from financial analysts and investors.

Between 2004 and 2018, we analysed nearly 78,000 conference calls on the results of listed US companies. We found that female executives were significantly more optimistic and less vague than their male counterparts when disclosing their company’s results or answering questions from analysts and investors. Using automatic natural language processing techniques, we measured the optimism of senior executives’ discourse by comparing the frequency of use of terms with positive connotations compared with more negative notions. Likewise, we measured their ambiguity based on the occurrence of terms expressing uncertainty.[1] When teleconferencing about results, female managers tend to favour positive terms (e.g. “achieve”, “obtain”, “excellent”, “improvement”, etc.) and avoid terms conveying a form of uncertainty (e.g. “estimate”, “around” and ”probably”).

In a complementary study, we focused more specifically on the tone of executives during teleconferences organised at the height of the financial crisis (from 2008 to 2009), when communicating company results could prove particularly difficult (De Amicis and Falconieri, 2023). We also found that, compared with men, women used a more positive and less ambiguous tone when disclosing their company’s information during this period. This is an important finding, as it confirms the existence of behavioural differences between men and women executives, particularly in the way they disclose corporate information to investors. This also resonates with some of the empirical data gathered during the Covid-19 pandemic, which point to women executives as being more direct, honest and inspiring in their communication.[2]

^¹ To draw up our classification of terms with positive, negative or ambiguous connotations, we used Loughran-McDonald’s dictionary (2011), which analyses information in a specifically financial context.

^² “The Leader of the Free World Gives a Speech, and She Nails It”, New York Magazine