Women and racial-ethnic minorities are underrepresented in (higher) leadership positions. Research on the psychological underpinnings of this underrepresentation traditionally focuses on stereotypicality bias explanations (i.e., women and minorities do not ?fit? the typical image of leaders). The present research introduces an additional, prototypicality bias explanation (i.e., women and minorities may not be perceived as ideal representatives of groups). Besides more elaborately specifying the underlying psychological mechanisms, the introduced Dual Pathway to Leadership Model also focuses on how the context (crisis and diversity policy) affects female and minority leadership through its influence on these mechanisms. Addressing shortcomings in the literature and novel research-questions, my main goal is to illuminate how biases in social-cognitive and social-identity processes simultaneously affect female and minority leadership-emergence and -evaluations under differing contexts. In order to attain this goal, I will perform four elaborate experiments which have important theoretical and practical implications for both glass ceiling researcher and work organizations. KEYWORDS: the glass ceiling, leadership, diversity