Beyond extraverted and courageous: Personality profiles and character strengths that position men to address gender bias at work

Abstract

A diverse account of allyship suggests that many kinds of people can be allies, and that some allyship strategies fit people's personalities and character strengths better than others. Allyship can be categorized into Committed Strategies (e.g., publicly highlighting women’s strengths) that involve significant social risk or personal sacrifice, and Relationship-Building Strategies (e.g., active listening) that build supportive and trusting bonds with marginalized group members. Latent profile analyses of survey data from two randomly split samples of 1,814 and 1,813 men from 103 countries were used to examine mean differences across Big Five personality profiles on Committed and Relationship-building allyship strategies toward women in the workplace. Results indicated that people with Well-Adjusted personalities (high on all Big Five traits except low in neuroticism) viewed both Committed and Relationship-building strategies as better-fitting to their personalities, as compared with the other three personality profiles that emerged in our data. Hierarchical regression analyses further found that five key character strengths (bravery, kindness, fairness, social intelligence, and perspective) explained additional variance beyond the Big Five in both Committed and Relationship-building strategies, reinforcing the value of character strengths in allyship. Exploratory bivariate correlations revealed that among the Big Five, agreeableness and openness were the strongest and most consistent predictors of 10 Committed and Relationship-building allyship strategies. These findings broaden the scope of who allies are and what allyship can look like, while offering men a variety of achievable and authentic ways of supporting women in the workplace.