It’s a Mad, Male World

Thanks to the Workplace Prof Blog for pointing out an article by Reuters on yet another study that shows that men are rewarded for being aggressive while women are punished for it.

The study, “When Can Angry Women Get Ahead?,” by Victoria Brescoll, a Yale University postdoc, found that men who express anger at work are often admired for it, but women who express anger in the workplace are often seen as emotional, irrational, and incompetent.

According to Reuters …

[Brescoll] conducted three tests in which men and women recruited randomly watched videos of a job interview and were asked to rate the applicant’s status and assign them a salary.

In the first, the 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 conferred the most status 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.

Brescoll also found that angry men got the most money:

The average salary assigned to the angry man was almost $38,000 compared to about $23,500 for the angry woman and in the region of $30,000 for the other two candidates. …

“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.”

That impacted salaries. Unemotional women were assigned on average $55,384 compared to $32,902 for the angry ones. Male executive candidates were assigned more than trainees, regardless of anger, with an average $73,643.

The findings are enough to make a woman … well … mad.