Does anybody like an angry woman?
Although the chairman's statement might have sounded like a personal attack, there are some who feel the assertion goes deeper. According to a new study, people strongly disapprove of women expressing anger in a professional context.
At the same time, they tend to admire men for doing so.
The new research, which was presented at the recent meeting of the Academy of Management (Philadelphia, August 5-8), finds these views to prevail among men and women, liberals and conservatives, sexists and non-sexists. In the words of the study's author, Victoria Brescoll of Yale University, the findings suggest bias against angry women to be "a deep-seated and even implicit reaction that people are subject to regardless of their conscious beliefs that sexism or group dominance is wrong."
"It's an attitude that is not conscious," adds Brescoll, a post-doctoral scholar at Yale. "People are hardly aware of it."
What does mitigate this bias, she found, is the offering of a credible reason for a woman's anger. Brescoll's research reveals that "when an external attribution was provided for ... anger, female and male professionals were accorded similar status." But males, she found, are accorded the same status whether they offer a reason for their anger or not.
The new research builds upon a series of experiments carried out almost a decade ago by Larissa Tiedens of Stanford University, who found that people conferred more status on leaders and workers who expressed anger than on those who expressed sadness. In one experiment, for example, carried out at the time of Bill Clinton's impeachment proceedings, participants viewed one or another of two brief video clips of the President testifying before a grand jury about the Monica Lewinsky scandal. In one clip he expressed anger about the investigation, and in the other he expressed sadness and guilt about his conduct. Participants who saw the anger clip were significantly more likely than those who saw the sadness clip to believe that Clinton should remain in office. This finding, which was largely unrelated to participants' political affiliation or gender, ran directly counter to the widespread view at the time that Clinton would be best served by being apologetic about what he had done.
The Stanford studies having largely involved male protagonists, Dr. Brescoll set out to determine whether the same benefits would accrue specifically to anger-expressing women. She found very much the opposite to be the case.
In one experiment, 39 men and 30 women recruited from a public fair were randomly assigned to view a video clip of about a minute and a half in which a male or female candidate for a job talked about his or her current position. The video scripts were identical except for a segment of a few seconds in which the interviewee described feeling either angry or sad about the loss of an account that occurred because a colleague who was supposed to bring key materials for a presentation got lost en route and arrived very late. To the interviewer's question, "So how did you feel when you left the meeting?" the interviewee answered in one of two ways: 1) "I was really annoyed. Well, I guess I was just really angry;" or 2) "I was really sad. Well, I guess I was just really sad."
Asked how much status, power, and independence the man or woman candidate should have in the job to be filled, participants conferred the most on the man who said he was angry, the second most on the woman who said she was sad, slightly less on the man who said he was sad, and least of all by a sizable margin on the woman who said she was angry. The average salary participants designated for the angry male candidate was almost $38,000, compared to about $23,500 for the angry female and in the general neighborhood of $30,000 for the other two candidates.
In a second experiment, Dr. Brescoll tested whether those results might reflect the fact that people associated women with low status in the workplace; perhaps they found it presumptuous for any low-status person, whether male or female, to display anger.
Once again, participants (180 in all) were randomly assigned to view a video clip from a job interview of a man or woman. The script was similar to that of the first study, but this time half the candidates, male and female alike, described their current occupation as trainee, and half were executives who were candidates for CEO. In addition, half the candidates, as in the previous study, described their reaction to the lost-account episode as anger, but this time the other half were not asked for their reaction and expressed no emotion at all.
"Remarkably," Brescoll writes, "participants rated the angry female CEO as significantly less competent than all of the other targets, including even the angry female trainee." They viewed "angry female targets as significantly more 'out of control' than the angry male targets and unemotional male and female targets."
Participants paid the female candidates not on the basis of their occupational status but on whether they expressed anger or no emotion. The unemotional female candidates were paid an average of $55,384 compared to $32,902 for the angry ones, while male executives were paid more than trainees regardless of their emotional expression, an average of $73,643 versus $36,810.
In a third experiment, Dr. Brescoll tested whether offering an excuse for anger would mitigate people's disapproval of its expression by women. As she puts it, "[P]eople may confer low status on an angry woman because they see her behavior as arising from something which is deep and inherent -- namely, that she is an 'angry' or 'out of control' person ...[A]n intervention designed to direct such attributions away from internal factors and toward external factors might be effective at mitigating the bias."
This time 133 participants watched one of six video clips of a job interview similar to that of the first experiment, half involving a male candidate and half a female candidate. In two of the scripts, the male or female candidate expressed anger about the colleague's lateness that resulted in loss of the account; in two he or she expressed no emotion; and in two he or she offered an excuse for the anger -- namely that the coworker lied beforehand in indicating he had directions to the client's office.
The angry female who provided an excuse for her anger was awarded a salary that was on average significantly below that of both male candidates but that was also a lot higher than that of the angry female candidate who provided no excuse -- $34,368 compared to $21,130. In addition, participants conferred about the same status on the woman candidate with an excuse that they conferred on both angry male candidates.
Dr. Brescoll distinguishes her research from studies that examine "discrimination against women who violate prescriptions for self-promotion. Women who promote their abilities are perceived as less likable and less hirable -- but they are still seen as competent... [W]omen who self-promote are explicitly asserting their competence, whereas angry women are not -- they are [seen as] simply emoting."
A study of unionized manufacturing workers that presented at the Academy of Management meeting by Marie-Helene Budworth of York University and Sara Mann of the University of Guelph suggests that that women who are modest about their accomplishments on the job earn less than those who are not, whereas for men the pattern is the reverse.
Brescoll's paper, which was judged the best dissertation-based submission to the Academy of Management's division on Gender and Diversity in Organizations, concludes: "[W]omen, like men, have the same need to achieve status and power. At the same time, to achieve and maintain high social status, professional women may also have to behave unemotionally in order to be seen as rational. Thus, it is important to identify strategies that professional women can use to express anger without incurring a social penalty. The present studies make a gesture in this regard with the finding that external, situational explanations for anger ameliorate negative responses to angry women."
Entitled "When Can Angry Women Get Ahead? Status Conferral, Gender, and Workplace Emotion Expression," the paper was among several thousand studies presented at the Academy of Management meeting. Founded in 1936, the Academy is the largest organization in the world devoted to management research and teaching. It has about 18,000 members in 100 countries, including some 10,000 in the United States. This year's annual meeting drew about 8,000 scholars and practitioners to Philadelphia from August 5th to 8th for nearly 1,700 sessions on a host of subjects relating to corporate organization and investment, the workplace, technology development, and other management-related topics.
AccountingWEB.com Aug-23-2007
Categories: Self Improvement, News Archives, Lite_News
Times read: 3112
Reprints
Firozali A Mulla , Aug-25-2007
Does anybody like an angry woman? Sir: George Bush’s curious comparison Iraq and Vietnam Where does Hillary stand here; Poised calm angry? I have a bed feeling that the things do not look the way we see from the TV and what exactly is happening. I mean we do not know too much. On Friday 24th August 2007 three British soldiers were shot what BBC said as “friendly fighting”. What is the meaning of going to Iraq and shoot your own partners and call this “Oops a mistaken drop ob a bomb!!?” I honestly think the English ought to come back, withdraw, if Americans are reducing the English numbers in the roll. Let the Americans stay, and then the dropping of the bombs will be scrutinized, vetted very sound. I thank you Firozali A.Mulla MBA PhD P.O.Box 6044 Dar-Es-Salaam Tanzania East Africa |
|
Firozali A Mulla , Aug-25-2007
Does anybody like an angry woman? Sir: It is at times very difficult to control your temper. After all we are social animals filled with likes and dislikes, hatred and favors. I am for example a woman. I try my best to control all the yoga methods etc. Do you ever think I will succeed? If Quantum theory as Dalai Lam stated is farce …he compared the Yoga with Quantum Theory that has serene emptiness, nothing in the body. Where is the breathing and the brain that fills the serene thoughts? Similarly, Sir. There are times the counting of ten just does not help. We are not looking at the anger. We are looking at the one sentence that says “If you lose tempter you do not lose head only. Does that summarize the culture and the position? Sir: Many a times I wonder why the British are so stuck to the titles like OBE, SIR etc. here I have one that is a total farce. Let me elaborate. Lady Di had a title now she is no more with us. Cannot we simply talk of Princess Diana. You see the title goes off once you die. Sir Cliff Richard . He was singer and brought lots of cash to the UK so he got the title SIR. Here I have some one who out does the titles. What happens now? I do not like this I do not like this at all The reason .I paid for the tickets long time back. Now I am told that there was price fixing by British Airways and Sir Richard Branson of Virgin. Having a SIR title means he is some personality of able ness but if this is cheating the passenger I think he goes like Mugabe. His sir hood ought to be take n awa6.He is no good. I get the news in Cricket fixing, the soccer fixing, boxing fixing etc. What is wrong with the Westerners compared to the graft we have in Tanzania. I do not see any difference. All pave the same way. Take few bucks here and few there. The meaning is the same. Is it not? I thank you Firozali A.Mulla MBA PhD P.O.Box 6044 Dar-Es-Salaam Tanzania East Africa
|
