A new study has shown that angry men are rewarded at work while angry women are punished.
[Victoria Brescoll, a post-doctoral scholar at Yale University] 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.
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.
Of course, to most of us, this isn’t a huge surprise. Studies have repeatedly shown that assertive women are viewed less favorably in the workplace than either assertive men or unassertive men or women. It makes sense that this attitude would extend to anger, as well. But I know that I’ve been in far too many arguments with sexist men who say that sexism is not a big deal anymore, and these types of observations about the differences in how men and women are perceived just “aren’t true.” It’s always nice to have a study to back you up and to have your life experiences validated in this manner.
The study is also really interesting because it not only links anger with coworker perceptions and salaries, but also directly to the perceptions of Senator Clinton as being “too angry.” Yes, I think that this is also something that any feminist could have realized for herself, but I also think that it’s pretty bold to place this assertion in a nationally-released study that was not sponsored by any kind of feminist organization. Privilege allows men to ignore or not even realize that they have these attitudes, so I welcome and applaud any media opportunity to call them on their shit.
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There’s a difference between having a bad temper that means you might just up and beat the shit out of someone and being chronically pissed off with the toxic state of our culture. I think Clinton’s anger is definitely the latter, and I respect her for it.
Yes. I also think that having a bad temper is not a good trait for anyone to have in a workplace. I think that there’s definitely a difference between being chronically angry and occasionally, justifiably angry. What it seems here is that men get all kinds of anger leeway, and women get pretty close to none. And that’s just fucked up.
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