[lbo-talk] "Angry men get ahead; angry women penalized: study"

[B.]

Angry men get ahead; angry women penalized: study

By Claudia Parsons
Fri Aug 3, 12:12 AM ET

A man who gets angry at work may well be admired for
it but a woman who shows anger in the workplace is
liable to be seen as "out of control" and incompetent,
according to a new study presented on Friday.

What's more, the finding may have implications for
Hillary Clinton as she attempts to become the first
female U.S. president, according to its author
Victoria Brescoll, a post-doctoral scholar at Yale
University.

Her research paper "When Can Angry Women Get Ahead?"
noted that Clinton was described last year by a
leading Republican as "too angry to be elected
president."

Previous research has indicated that anger can
communicate that an individual feels entitled to
dominate others, and therefore perhaps is. But
Brescoll said such studies focused on men.

"As Senator Clinton's experience suggests, however,
for a professional woman anger expression may lead to
a decrease rather than an increase in her status,"
Brescoll wrote.

She 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.

SALARY GAP

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.

In a second experiment, the script was similar except
that the job applicant also described his or her
current occupation as 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."

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.

A third experiment tested whether a good reason for
anger made any difference. 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.

Sure enough, the angry woman with a good reason to be
angry was awarded a much higher salary than the angry
woman who provided no excuse, though it was still less
than the men.

The study found similar attitudes to anger among male
and female participants.

"It's an attitude that is not conscious," Brescoll
said. "People are hardly aware of it."

Brescoll said the findings revealed a "difficult
paradox" for professional women -- while anger can
serve as a powerful tool to achieve status at work,
women may have to behave calmly in order to be seen as
rational.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20070803/us_nm/work_women_anger_dc