Women working in business often have to juggle an increasing number of “paradoxical tensions”, a new study has found – and it’s affecting the way they do their jobs.

To explore this tension, researchers Wei Zheng, Olca Surgevil and Ronit Kark interviewed 64 executives from the US. And in the journal Sex Roles, they write that top-level women leaders are expected to both display agency and warmth, despite the fact the two qualities are often considered to be antithetical to one another. They’re then expected to “deal with the incongruity” between communal gender role expectations and more agentic leader role expectations.

The team identified four paradoxical ‘balancing acts’. The first is the pressure for women to be both demanding and caring: one HR executive told them that pushing her team to succeed had been beneficial in a business sense, but that she had been told that she was “intimidating” when given feedback on the project. “Would I get the same feedback if I was a man?” she said.

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