Best Paper Award for Lavinia Kinnes paper about stereotypes of female CEOs

At the 2025 European Winter Meeting of the Econometric Society, which took place from December 7 to 9 in Nicosia, Cyprus, Lavina Kinne and Virginia Sondergeld were awarded the Best Paper Prize. The award-winning project by the two authors is entitled: “Meet my family: women in leadership and gender stereotypes in the media.”

We congratulate them on this great success! 

In their study, the two authors examine media coverage of women on the executive and supervisory boards of DAX companies. Their analysis of around 45,000 newspaper articles from three major German daily newspapers shows that media coverage of women and men in senior management positions reproduces gender stereotypes.

For example, reporting on female board members focuses more on family and caregiving, while male board members are more strongly associated with leadership and power. In the second part of the study, the authors use a survey experiment to show that the stereotypical portrayal of female CEOs partially influences readers' expectations and their financial decisions regarding the CEOs' companies.