Finally, a study will be published that documents what we all have known ever since women entered the workforce: men are admired and are financially rewarded for getting angry at work, whereas women who get angry at work are financially penalized and generally viewed as incompetent.
This research, conducted by Victoria Brescoll, who is a post-doctoral scholar at Yale University, will be presented at this weekend's annual meeting of the research and teaching organization, Academy of Management.
To do this research, Brescoll had her study participants watch videos of men and women job candidates who used the same or similar scripts and she asked them to estimate each candidate's salary and status.
In the first video test, all the candidates' scripts were identical except where the candidate described feeling either angry or sad about losing an account due to a colleague's late arrival at a meeting. Participants gave the highest status to the man who said he was angry, the second most to the woman who said she was sad, slightly less to the man who said he was sad, and least of all, and by a sizable margin, to the woman who said she was angry.
When asked to estimate the average salary for each candidate, the participants assigned almost $38,000 to the angry man but only about $23,500 to the angry woman while the other two candidates were estimated to earn approximately $30,000 each.
In the second video test, the scripts were similar except that the job candidate also described his or her current occupation as either a trainee or a senior executive.
"Participants rated the angry female CEO as significantly less competent than all of the other targets, including even the angry female trainee," Brescoll wrote. She said they viewed angry females as significantly more "out of control."
More importantly, this viewpoint affected salaries. Unemotional women were assigned on average $55,384 compared to $32,902 for angry women and male executive candidates were assigned more than trainees, regardless of anger, with an average $73,643.
A third video test asked whether a good reason for anger made any difference in the results. In this experiment, the script was changed so that some angry candidates explained that the co-worker who arrived late had lied beforehand, indicating he had directions to the meeting. In this experiment, the angry woman with a good reason for her anger was awarded a much higher salary than the angry woman who provided no excuse, although both angry women still were awarded lower salaries than the angry men.
"It's an attitude that is not conscious," Brescoll reported. "People are hardly aware of it."
So why is anger is such a bad thing for women to express, even when they clearly have good reasons for being angry, and further, if they were angry men instead, why is their anger viewed positively?
Source
Rewritten from a Reuters story.
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well I guess I know why I got written up at work the other day for something that was innocuous but when they gave me a verbal warning I got angry, and then I got a written warning in my file...
If I was a guy I would probably have gotten a raise!
This study is tremendously important to all women struggling for fair treatment the work place.
Several friends sent this story to me this am. I spent most of my working life in a parallel universe, with the males in my peer group s being assertive, while I was judged aggressive!
Talk about written reviews, warnings, and 'no raise because of your attitude problem!
This review is long over due, but I'm grateful for academic confirmation of a HU
Angry women are "out of control" - less likely to be controllable by the men in charge (and for all our progress it's still almost always men). A angry woman is putting her own expectation, ideas, demands, point of view, etc. foremost, not deferring to others. It still comes down to control, and a compliant woman is easier to control than an angry one.
Hmm. Did they only use a single "angry female", "angry male" etc. The salaries could have been awarded for quality of acting. Mutter, mutter, replication, mutter mutter.
Bob
My thought is that an angry woman invokes feelings from a person's family of origin. Children depend on their mothers for suvival, much more so than on their dads. When mom is angry, it is a time to watch out.
Another thought. The first salary question asked how much the person was making. Having a low salary and being taken advantage of are good reasons to be angry. I would think if they asked about other life factors that were reasonable justifications for being angry, the subjects would attribute more of them to the angry woman than to the non-angry woman. Things like bad marriage, abusive husband, those sorts of things.
One of the few self-help type books that is worth anything was written about this topic. The Dance of Anger by Harriet Lerner discusses this phenomenon in depth.
joseph; i have read that book and also thought it was very good.
Was this test culture-specific? I would wonder how the same test would fare if given to executives from various different cultural groups: say, a US group, a European group, an East Asian group, and a Middle Eastern group. That doesn't cover the entire world, but you get the idea. It might be interesting to see how cultural ideas about masculinity and femininity affect the results.
This is so recognizable! My boyfriend and I used to work at the same firm (he still does, I quit a few weeks ago). Both he and I have had several conflicts with the managing director.
My boyfriend usually just gets very angry with him and starts debating aggressively with him. It made him manager and he now earns one of the highest salaries at the firm.
I sometimes got angry, sometimes turned sad. If I got angry the conflict would only get worse and I'd hear afterwards that I shouldn't have gotten so angry. If I turned sad I still wouldn't win the argument but would sometimes get an apology. Neither emotion ever got me a raise, though.
If you're interested in reading about the 'lovely' situation at my former work, I hope you'll enjoy two of my columns: The enemy is called Salary... & When loyalty turns into codependency