Does the Glass Ceiling Affect Gay Men? A New Study Says Yes – Them

The glass ceiling doesn’t just affect women: Gay cis men can feel its effects, too. A recent University of Sydney study found that more “traditionally feminine”-presenting gay men may be more likely to get passed up for leadership roles in the workplace.

In the study, which was published in the journal Sex Roles, researchers asked 256 Australian men (half gay and half straight) to help cast a gay man to represent Sydney in a faux tourism campaign. The participants, who were unaware of the subject of the study, watched audition tapes of six white, gay “shortlisted candidates.” In the videos, the actors read from a short script “in a manner where their voice and body language was manipulated to come across as either masculine or feminine-presenting.” Afterward, participants were asked to vote for the candidate they thought people would most think of as a leader.

Both gay and straight men significantly favored the more traditionally masculine-presenting gay candidates over the more feminine-presenting candidates. As the study points out, this could be attributed to the “think manager-think male” stereotype, in which people tend to subconsciously associate leadership qualities with masculine characteristics. 

That logic helps perpetuate stereotypes that gay men are “feminine and therefore perceived as less equipped to occupy higher-status positions in social hierarchies, such as the workplace.”

While researchers attributed the results to straight men’s “greater anti-gay sentiment,” they also reasoned that the discrimination that more feminine-presenting cis gay men experience can cause gay men to internalize negative beliefs about “male femininity” and avoid presenting as such to avoid negative treatment in different areas of their lives.

Ironically, the study points out that transformational leadership theories, which are models of leadership that rely on the encouragement of a team to achieve overall success, argue that people with more stereotypically feminine traits, such as empathy, nurturance, and interpersonal sensitivity, are better equipped to manage modern organizations than those with more stereotypically masculine traits. 

This isn’t the first time that the “gay glass ceiling” has been studied. Back in 2018, an analysis of data from UK households (with a sample size of over 600,000 adults) found that gay employees are significantly less likely to be promoted to higher-level managerial positions than their straight peers with similar levels of education and experience.

To be clear, capitalist business practices certainly aren’t the be-all, end-all of breaking down unhealthy preconceptions about sex and gender. But in this case, understanding the extent to which such biases impact cis queer men can help us understand how a diverse array of queer, trans, and gender-nonconforming folks can be impacted by outdated gender norms at work and beyond.

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