Workplace biases: decoding the emotional gender divide and its impact on professional dynamics

Why does everybody think that women are more emotional than men? In one study on workplace gender stereotypes (Heilman et al., 1995), the centrality of emotion stereotypes came to light, specifically in comprehending prejudice toward female managers. Heilman, Block and Martell (1995) employed six subscales derived from the established Think Manager, Think Male 92-item inventory (Schein and Davidson, 1993), with four subscales dedicated to agentic behaviours and two to emotions – emotional stability and rationality. Their study showed that when participants evaluated the traits of a successful female manager, she was perceived as possessing traits identical to a successful male manager, except in emotion-related dimensions. Even explicit information about the objective success of the female leader did not alter the perception that she was more emotional than an equally successful male colleague, challenging notions of her stability and rationality.

In the pursuit of understanding the extent to which stereotypes regarding emotional differences between genders impact decision-making processes, particularly in workplace dynamics, hiring practices, promotions, and salary negotiations, the present study seeks to explore the ways in which these perceptions contribute to biases, while exposing the numerous implications for gender inequality within professional spheres. Beliefs surrounding gender and emotion not only detrimentally affect the success prospects of women leaders, but also impede organizational effectiveness and efficient allocation of human resources. When gender-emotion stereotypes are allowed to skew the selection and assessment of women professionals, society experiences a failure in optimally leveraging the entire talent pool.

This article will focus on delineating the challenges and biases in workplace dynamics, focusing on two main viewpoints: statistical discrimination and gendered social norms. In addition, it will explore the prejudice towards women’s emotional displays compared to men, and it will delve into the different perceptions of anger, sadness, and self-promotion in relation to status and gender.

It is important to mention the limitations of the present article, since most of the studies addressing these matters have predominantly focused on white men and women, particularly within the United States. Provided insights into other ethnicities and communities are often derived from small samples, thus the generalizability of results may be uncertain. Further research, encompassing diverse ethnic groups and featuring robust replication efforts, is essential to advance a more inclusive analysis of the dynamics underpinning gender-related phenomena.

Challenges and biases in workplace dynamics

"I don't think a woman should be in any government job whatever. I mean, I really don't. The reason why I do is mainly because they are erratic. And emotional." - Richard Nixon

Considerable progress has been made in comprehending both the structural and psychological impediments confronting women as they strive to attain and sustain leadership positions. As Global Gender Gap Report 2023 displayed, women have surpassed males in almost all OECD countries in terms of educational achievement, confirming the reversing trend of gender inequality in higher education (Vincent-Lancrin, 2008). The gender pay gap is narrowing, albeit slowly, and societies are witnessing decline in support for conventional gender standards coupled with an increase in support for women working. However, gender disparities in the labour sector persist notwithstanding the ongoing trends towards equality. Further exploration of the potential causes of persistent inequality will take place in the paragraphs that follow. The relevant theoretical stances will be divided into two main categories: the cultural perspectives, which focus on gender stereotypes and social norms (Stewart et al., 2021), and the statistical discrimination perspective (Arrow, 2015).

Statistical discrimination

Based on an economic viewpoint, the theory of statistical discrimination predicts that employers will evaluate job candidates' potential productivity based on their observable traits, such as human capital, and will assign average group traits to them to evaluate their unobservable traits (ibid.). All other things being equal, employers would evaluate men's productivity higher and discriminate against women, since women are more likely to miss work owing to family obligations. "Some of this is due to statistical discrimination, with employers expecting that mothers will be more likely than fathers to cut back on their hours and, maybe, leave the workforce altogether" (Bohnet, 2018, p.32). Such phenomenon outlined by Bohnet (2018) is known as the child salary penalty for women (Budig and England, 2001) and antithetically mirrors the child salary premium for men. The cognitive process expecting women to be less productive can be identified as a confirmatory categorization, where employers tend to favour information that confirms the consistency of their initial assessments, in addition to being a representativeness heuristic, since employers overestimate the degree to which both female and male candidates are representative of the entire group they supposedly belong to.

Michael Norton, a Harvard Business School professor, conducted a thorough analysis of the underlying confirmatory categorization that exists in our minds when it comes to evaluations (Bohnet, 2018). Participants of his experiment were tasked with assessing applicants for a job position that is generally associated with men, where experience and education are equally important factors. In scenarios where the top two candidates possessed diverse backgrounds and educational levels, gender stereotypes played a significant role in shaping the evaluators' preferences towards male candidates. Interestingly, the justifications given for their decisions assigned differing importance to education and/or experience, depending on the candidate’s gender.

Expanding the discussion about statistical discrimination, gender-based issues still arise not only in the recruiting processes, but also in salary negotiations.

"Negotiating matters. In fact, it matters profoundly. People who are less likely to ask about better compensation are not just worse off than those who are willing to do so, but considerably so. […] But there is more. The researchers report that men’s starting salaries were $4,000, or almost 8 percent higher than women’s. The rippling consequences hardly stop there. Willingness to negotiate also affects career advancement, […]".(Bohnet, 2018, pp. 65-66).

As delineated by Bohnet (2018), a pattern exists wherein women often receive less favourable negotiation opportunities, contributing to an overarching gender pay gap. From this observation, edifying insights surface on the critical importance of meticulous preparation for women engaging in salary negotiations and negotiations in general (Ayres and Siegelman, 1995). Consequently, it is essential for women to ensure that their competencies and expertise are effectively and prominently communicated to the employer prior to the presentation of any initial salary offer: pay transparency and proactive measures to showcase skills and knowledge become imperative tools in addressing statistical discrimination.

Gender Stereotypes and Social Norms

According to data presented in the paper "Potential and the Gender Promotion Gap" (Benson et al., 2023), women employees were rated as having higher performance on average than male employees, but their ratings for potential were 8.3% lower: compared to their male colleagues, female employees had an average 14% lower chance of being promoted.

"Taken together, gender differences in potential ratings can explain up to half of the overall gender promotion gap" (Benson et al., 2023, p.3). The research illustrates that, despite outperforming their male counterparts with comparable potential scores, women consistently received lower potential ratings for the forthcoming year (Benson et al., 2023). The difficulties inherent in evaluating potential for promotion lies in the ambiguity of criteria, rendering them susceptible to diverse interpretations, stereotypes, and biases held by hiring managers. Specifically, managerial difficulty may arise in envisioning a woman in a leadership role, influenced by prejudiced notions associated with leadership often aligned with stereotypical male traits such as assertiveness and dominance. Furthermore, confirmation bias is a major factor in how people perceive gendered behaviours. When people observe different behaviours from men and women, they often attribute these differences to an intrinsic quality that they believe to be a fundamental aspect of what it means to be a man or a woman. This tendency to exaggerate the significance and magnitude of these differences perpetuates and reinforces gender stereotypes (Levy et al., 1998).

The specific role of emotionality in the context of gender stereotypes in the workplace has garnered relatively scant attention within academic literature. This oversight becomes even more perplexing when considering the widespread association of emotionality and being a woman (Frasca et al., 2022). Indeed, people tend to assume that decisions made by female leaders were motivated by emotion even when descriptions of their decision-making process leave out any discussion of their emotional state. Not to mention, this line of reasoning does not apply to the descriptions of male leaders who make the exact same choice.

The truth is that men and women do not differ in the extent to which they experience various emotions, however substantial differences exist in the observed expression of these emotions, with women being noted to display them more frequently than men (Plant et al., 2000). In societal perceptions, men are generally acknowledged to experience emotions, while women are often labelled as inherently emotional and irrational, thus incompetent. Therefore, if the perception is that women are the more emotional sex, from where can we trace the origin of this belief? More from the reasons of their behaviours than the actions themselves. In other words, when it comes to women's emotional responses, internal elements like personality are more likely to be blamed than external environmental factors or particular circumstances. Despite being provided with situational information about the reasons behind the targets’ emotional reactions, participants in two studies by Barrett and Bliss-Moreau (2009) more often judged women displaying emotions as "emotional" than they did masculine targets as "having a bad day", respectively a dispositional and a situational attribution for the behaviour displayed. Due to such perceptual bias, people tend to project emotionality onto the actions of a woman even when no such emotion is displayed.

The notion that women are naturally more emotional contributes to the difficulties experienced by female leaders, since they often have their emotional outbursts interpreted as being more intense than equal male reactions. Ingrained gender-emotion stereotypes (Plant et al., 2000) lead to notice and sometimes exaggerate information that fits the stereotype, while ignoring or failing to notice what does not fit the stereotype. This confirmatory categorization strengthens first impressions and influences how new information will be interpreted in the future.

"Women who violate norms pay a social price"

"Women in stereotypically male domains encounter backlash at every juncture: when getting hired, compensated, and promoted. Psychologists believe that these negative reactions are due to a clash between our stereotypical perceptions of what women are or should be like (their gender roles), and the qualities we think are necessary to perform a typically male job. […], women who violate norms pay a social price" (Bohnet, 2018, p.22).

In various societal contexts, individuals often find themselves compelled to express emotions challenging established gender norms (Stewart et al., 2021). This difficulty becomes particularly pronounced within leadership roles, where women confront a conflict between the expected emotional displays tied to their gender and those associated with effective leadership. Notably, leadership demands not only emotional control (Torrence and Connelly, 2019), but also demonstrations of emotions indicative of confidence, competence, and an entitlement to wield authority. These expectations create a unique challenge for women leaders, as the established display rules in leadership mirror traditional gender norms for men.

"Status incongruity and backlash effects: Defending the gender hierarchy motivates prejudice against female leaders" by Rudman et al. (2012) contributed to shed light on the repercussions faced by women in challenging traditional gender hierarchies: in the study, instances of displaying emotions deemed excessive, insufficient, or inconsistent with expectations, especially anger, are found to trigger personality-based interpretations. The attribution bias comes into play, where women's anger tends to be attributed to internal causes, perpetuating a decline in the status conferred upon them. This cognitive bias, reflecting consistent deviations from normative judgment patterns, results in perceptual distortions, inaccurate evaluations, and illogical interpretations of events and behaviours.

Amid these challenges, women may inadvertently be the ones reinforcing gender-emotion stereotypes: some women deliberately embrace the "ice queen" persona (Okimoto and Brescoll, 2010; Heilman et al., 2004) to avoid negative reactions linked to displaying excessive emotion, only to face penalties for not being emotional enough, a paradoxical consequence of trying to evade backlash effects.

Widespread beliefs regarding the expected behaviours of men and women contribute to the evaluation of women who deviate from feminine stereotypes, leading to perceptions of them as unlikable and undeserving. Gender stereotypes play a crucial role in shaping evaluations of female leaders, encompassing two primary dimensions: communality and agency. In comparison to men, women are typically perceived as more communal, embodying qualities like warmth, kindness, and nurturing, while being viewed as less agentic, lacking traits such as aggressiveness, ambition, dominance, and independence. The challenge for female leaders extends to two fundamental obstacles: determining the appropriate degree of emotion to express and identifying the suitable type of emotion to display.

Anger, sadness, and self-promotion

"They are casting Hillary Clinton as an Angry Woman, a she-monster melding images of Medea, the Furies, harpies… This gambit handcuffs Hillary: If she doesn't speak out strongly against President Bush, she's timid and girlie. If she does, she's a witch and a shrew." (Dowd, 2006, p. A21)

The fact that female in the workplace expressing anger are labelled as "out of control" not only influences compensation and salary decisions, but also bestows lower power and status upon women. According to Brescoll and Uhlmann (2008, p.273), only "when an angry woman offered an external attribution for her anger, she did not suffer the same loss in perceived status and competence". Anger is in fact a status emotion and is associated with entitlement and reserved for high-status individuals (Tiedens, 2001), playing a unique role in professional contexts. Men expressing anger receive elevated status and increased independence, while women expressing even mild anger face perceptions of reduced competence and employability. Remarkably, in contexts allowing them to wield power, such as interpersonal relationships, drawbacks for women expressing anger diminish, revealing the contextual nature of these biases.

If anger displays make women lose perceived status and competence, what are the backlashes of sadness and emotional vulnerability? Women's inclination to openly express sadness in the workplace contributes to a prevalent belief that female leaders, by engaging in discussions about their emotions, become susceptible to taking criticisms and failures more personally than their male counterparts (Feldhahn, 2011). The consequence of this perceived inability to control emotional influence extends beyond individual reactions. The constant perception of deficiency in emotional control not only erodes confidence in women's leadership capabilities but also creates a conflation between the outward display of emotions and their biasing influence on thoughts and behaviours.

This interconnected chain of biased associations amplifies the challenges women face, contributing to the perception that their decisions and behaviours are more emotionally driven compared to men. The situation is made worse by the widespread idea that emotions impair one's ability to make rational decisions. However, is this always the case? Do emotions of any gender interfere with decision-making? No, not always. As affective and cognitive processes have been found to be intrinsically linked, the idea that emotions may interfere with reason has been refuted by recent cognitive neuroscience research, which show that some emotions frequently contribute to sound reasoning and effective decision-making, rather than taking away from it (Barrett and Bliss-Moreau, 2009).? One analysis conducted in 1994 by Bechara, Damasio, Damasio, and Anderson, offers an intriguing case-study involving gambling. Damage to the orbitofrontal cortex, a part of the brain linked to emotional sensitivity to reward and punishment, prevented the participants from changing their conduct to follow the more rational course of action, because they were unable to feel the negative feelings that come with significant losses (Bechara et al., 1994). This research suggests that the widespread preconception that feeling emotions impose illogical biases on judgement calls is not always verified.

The delicate process of self-promotion is a third component in the analysis of the gendered biases towards women. Self-promotion is an agentic behaviour that goes against feminine ideals of modesty and self-effacement: according to Rudman et al. (2012), performing such behaviour creates an impression of excessive power, which paradoxically makes it less likely for women to be promoted and/or selected for leadership positions.

Another approach, as demonstrated Brescoll and Uhlmann's research (2008), highlights the possible advantages of emotional neutrality for women. Retaining emotional neutrality brings about observable benefits, such as improved assessments of efficiency, elevated perceptions of employability, and a greater chance of being eligible for a salary rise. Adopting emotional neutrality is not without its difficulties, though. Even if it protects women from some biases, it runs the danger of making them appear unfeminine, emotionless, and cold – another departure from social norms. This creates a delicate balancing act for women in the workforce, constantly entangled in a conundrum of contradictions, compelled to reconcile personal authenticity with societal expectations.

Conclusions

To conclude, when properly acknowledged and managed, emotions can support both genders' ability to make well-informed decisions. It is important for both men and women in society to realise that emotional expression need not imply a perceived lack of competence or reason, and that emotional intelligence and rational decision-making are not mutually exclusive. This study has thoroughly investigated and verified the impacts of biased and statistical discrimination based on gender on workplace dynamics, particularly in relation to recruiting, salary negotiations, and promotions. Bohnet's work (2018) sheds light on the possible effectiveness of behavioural treatments in breaking down gender-based stereotypes by proposing that real change necessitates a redefining of socially accepted standards that regulate behaviour in addition to a change in personal beliefs, by including discerning judgement procedures, such as the crowd-within approach or the consideration of opposing perspectives, into organisational training programmes.

Future designs should place a strong emphasis on resolving the dichotomy where competence and likeability seem to be mutually exclusive. When their work is evident, women face the contradictory difficulty of being viewed as less likeable than their male colleagues. On the other hand, when it comes to ambiguous performance, successful women face prejudice that casts doubt on people’s assessments of their ability, relative to men who have achieved similar levels of success. Males who work jobs that do not conform to standard gender norms encounter similar dynamics that are shaped by prejudices as well. However, unlike women, they do not lose their likeability: males in non-stereotypical roles might be assessed as having less competence, but their likeability will still be there.

Dismantling gender-related biases and fostering equitable assessments of individuals' capacities necessitates further research on strategic implementation of behavioural interventions. The potential for norm change, through behavioural design, strengthens the case for a more enduring and consistent transformation, by moving beyond reliance on top-down strategies, such as quotas and regulations, and advocating for a reorganization of social norms. In the words of Margaret Mead, "Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it's the only thing that ever has."

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