Internalization of Gender Roles: Challenges for Female CIOs in Ensuring IT Security Compliance.

IT security compliance is critical to the organization’s success, and such compliance depends largely on IT leadership. Despite the growing female leadership and the prevalence of unconscious gender bias and stereotyping in IT, there is little research that examines gender stereotypes and internalization factors in the context of IT leadership and security compliance. The evidence from our experiment using data from MTurk suggests that gender – both CIOs’ and employees’, plays an important role in how IT leadership characteristics – perceived expertise and leadership style influences the employees’ intentions and reactance to comply with CIO’s security recommendations. The study informs IT literature on the role of the security message sender’s characteristics and guides CIOs, particularly women, on how they can tailor their leadership style to increase security compliance. Our research provides several theoretical, managerial and social implications while responding to the calls for increased attention to social inclusion issues in IT. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]