ABSTRACT

In Indonesia, men obtain more favourable chances to take vital roles in leadership. It is an indication that women remain vastly underrepresented as leaders, and they are also undervalued even by other women. This study is aimed at investigating how women leaders are perceived by men and how social construction could contribute to how men perceive women’s leadership aspirations, as one of the determinants of women’s participation as leaders. This study was conducted by distributing online questionnaires to 147 male sophomore students in state and private universities in Indonesia. An adapted version of the Gender Authority Measure (GAM) instrument was employed to measure attitudes toward female leaders. In addition, the Leadership Aspiration Subscale (LAS) was employed to measure perceptions of female leadership aspirations. The results of the study showed that there was a negative correlation between male students’ attitudes toward women leaders and perceptions of female leadership aspirations (r = −0.218, n = 147, p < 0.05), indicating that male students with more negative attitudes toward women leaders tend to perceive that women have lower leadership aspirations.