Angry Women and What not to Read

This week was my blog’s on-campus event, and we choose a perfect speaker for it. Tori Brescoll, a pioneer in the field of female specific research, is my personal hero, and her research in part inspired this blog.


Tori’s background is in social psychology, but she is currently an assistant professor at the School of Management. She is best known for her research on the role of stereotyping in the workplace and the ways that defying gender stereotypes in particular is detrimental to women's progress within organizations. Her main finding, and the one she is most well known for, focuses on anger expression in women. Women, she finds, are penalized for expressions of anger- more expressions of anger are correlated to less favorable evaluations of leadership and job competency. Men, on the other hand, experience the opposite: angry outbreaks are correlated with positive evaluations of their competency.


Tori covered the specific findings of her research, but more generally warned against the recommendations presented in popular literature pertaining to optimizing behavior in the workplace. She advises us to be wary in reading texts that promote the adoption of traditionally masculine behaviors in leadership roles. Tori’s favorite example is self-promotion. Men benefit when they self-promote directly, whereas women are more likely to be rated as less competent following direct verbal self-promotion. Tori pointed to “Nice Girls Don’t get the Corner Office” as an example of a best seller that promotes lay theories of useful strategies for women that aren’t necessarily corroborated by any of the evidence.


Tori’s actionable recommendations are to adopt the strategies that research suggests are rewarded by colleagues and evaluators. So far, she says, we know that demonstrating warmth, even before job competency, results in favorable viewings by coworkers. She predicts that we will find other similar qualities or manners that predict success for women.


The take away point from this blog entry is that women should be wary about the recommendations they consume on this topic. Look to the empirical research on perceptions and stereotypes of women in professional contexts as opposed to popular literature. The empirical research exists- look there first.