Assessments of agentic perceptions are central to gender and leadership research. However, there is ambiguity about the definition, content, and structure of agency. Based on a review of how agency has been operationalized in the gender and leadership literature over the past 44 years, I developed and validated a new six-factor model of agency, CADDIS (i.e., Competent agency, Ambitious agency, Dominant agency, Diligent agency, Independent agency, and Self-assured agency). I found that the CADDIS model of agency led to a different understanding of past conclusions—an agentic advantage occurred when women were perceived to possess competent agency, diligent agency, and independent agency, and an agentic disadvantage occurred when women were perceived to possess dominant agency. I also discuss two ongoing research projects that build on the CADDIS model by: (1) examining the interactions between agency factors with the goal of understanding how to reduce the dominance penalty for women in leadership; and (2) testing nonlinear effects of ambitious agency for men and women. Providing further evidence for the distinctiveness of the six factors, the first project found that whereas competent agency weakened the dominance penalty, independent agency strengthened it (and self-assured, diligent, and ambitious agency did not consistently remedy or exacerbate the dominance penalty). The second project discusses ongoing research on the SPaCE model of communality, its relationship with agency, and implications for gender and leadership.
