A new study found that women are less likely to be perceived as “nice guys” at work after middle age than men.
According to a paper published in the Journal of Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes:Both men and women with careers are believed to increase in ability and skill with age, but only women are believed to “lose warmth” with age.It says.
This study examines how career women are viewed relative to men, and how this changes with age. For the experiment, 1,600 US-based participants were recruited and three surveys were conducted.
“Women are most likely to be stereotyped and discriminated against in midlife,” says co-author of the paper, Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley. School of Business professor Jennifer Chatman said.
Chatman says the study may help explain why women are “still lacking” in key positions such as directors at Fortune 500 companies.
“Research has shown that middle age is a particularly volatile time for women. It can easily lead to poor performance reviews, which is very important because the middle stages of a career are a time when people are being groomed for top positions in the organization,” says Chatman.
“If stereotyped prejudice undermines the performance of women, the chances are that women will be educated for executive positions in organizations, or actually hold positions such as CEOs. will be lower.”
The expectation that women should be absolutely kinder than men
In one of the three surveys, from 2020 to 2021, 999 people living in the United States participated in an experiment in which they expressed their opinions about career men and women.
Participants were given a fictitious profile and image of either Steve Wilson or Sue Miller as a product manager working for a tech company.
Half of the participants were given a profile of 46-year-old Steve or Sue and asked to imagine what they were like when they were 29. The remaining participants were given a profile of 29-year-old Steve or Sue and asked to imagine them at 46. Participants rated the profile’s characteristics, such as “aggressiveness” and “kindness.”
The survey found that while both men and women are viewed as having higher levels of work performance from adulthood to middle age, there is a big difference in how middle-aged women and men perceive “warmth.” There is.Middle-aged women were seen as “less warm” than men.
Chatman isBecause women “have a narrower range of acceptable behaviors,” as they grow older, they become more confident and more assertive, “that alone makes them less agreeable.” be regarded asSay.
“Since warmth is seen as a particularly prominent attribute for women, there is an expectation that women should be absolutely kinder than men. It will provoke a backlash from the people.”
Such prejudices go back to the “hunter-gatherer era,” when men were responsible for “hunting” and “protection,” while women were responsible for “parenting,” Chatman said.
“These stereotypes, born of outdated role divisions, persist despite being irrelevant.
The problem is that work is closely tied to the roles expected of these men and women. For men, there is no gap between the stereotypical expectations of them and what is expected of them at work.
But because women’s competence goes against stereotypical expectations of women, it creates an irreconcilable contradiction with what is expected of women in the workplace in the first place.”
In Chatman’s current study,A result that supports the old-fashioned prejudice that women with strong self-assertion are considered unfavorable and arrogantbecame.
Former Meta COO Sheryl Sandberg, in her 2013 book, Lean in—Women, Work, and the Willingness of Leaders, explored experiments conducted at Columbia Business School and New York University in 2003. Introducing.
The experiment replicated the resume of an extroverted and successful female entrepreneur named Heidi. Some of the duplicated résumés still had Heidi’s name, while others were re-named to a man named Howard.
When business school students read Heidi’s resume and Howard’s résumé prepared in this way, they said that both Heidi and Howard were equally capable, but Howard had a favorable personality. He said that he was a person who could play a team, but he judged that Heidi was a person who was fiercely self-assertive and hated to lose.
“Gap in recognition of men and women” that hinders women’s active participation
Another study found that if middle-aged women were not seen as “pleasant” and “warm,” they received lower marks in job performance reviews.The study tracked the course evaluations of 126 US business school professors using reviews from 59,600 MBA students between 2003 and 2018.
Middle-aged female professors were rated lower than younger female professors on items such as “caring,” “kind,” and “helpful,” and ratings declined with age. On the other hand, male professors’ evaluations continued to rise as they got older.
Chatman believes that drawing more attention to the findings of this study can help address these biases. For organizations,When a woman makes a critical comment, she advises that men and women should be judged by the same standards of conduct so that they are not seen as being more critical than the man who made the criticism.
De-biasing performance appraisals is also a step towards achieving gender equality in the workplace.
“Performance appraisals are highly gender-sensitive, meaning that they evoke gender stereotypes in which women lose out in the comparison.
I think we should find more neutral terms and create a more level playing field in judging men and women,” Chatman said.
[Original: Middle-aged women are seen as less ‘nice’ than men and it’s probably costing them high-paying jobs, a new paper found]
(Translated by Yukari Watanabe, edited by Sayuri Daimon)
Source: BusinessInsider
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