Favorable Evaluations of Black and White Women’s Workplace Anger During the Era of #MeToo

Abstract

Researchers investigating gender and anger have consistently found that White women, but not White men, are evaluated unfavorably when experiencing anger in the workplace. Our project originally aimed to extend findings on White women’s, Black women’s, and White men’s workplace anger by examining whether evaluations are exacerbated or buffered by invalidating or affirming comments from others. In stark contrast to previous research on gender stereotyping and anger evaluations, however, results across four studies (N = 1,095) showed that both Black and White women portrayed as experiencing anger in the workplace were evaluated more favorably than White men doing so. After Study 1’s initial failure to conceptually replicate, we investigated whether perceivers’ evaluations of women’s workplace anger could have been affected by the contemporaneous cultural event of #MeToo. Supporting this possibility, we found evaluations were moderated by news engagement and beliefs that workplace opportunities are gendered. Additionally, we found invalidating comments rarely affected evaluations of a protagonist yet affirming comments tended to favorably affect evaluations. Overall, findings suggest the need for psychologists to consider the temporary, or perhaps lasting, effects of cultural events on research outcomes.

Anger at work

“…Research by Livingston et al (2012) finds that Black women leaders were favorably evaluated when enacting agentic behaviors. McCormick-Huhn and Shields (2021) extend this finding by examining how angry Black women are evaluated at work. In two studies (Studies 2 & 3), they compared reactions to angry Black women with reactions to angry white men.…”

“…Specifically, the design we use in Study 2, which crosses the gender of the worker with the emotion they are expressing-anger vs. sadness vs. muted emotion -is the only design that can test whether anger is penalized or sadness is rewarded. Previous work examined the anger-status relation by either comparing angry workers to sad workers (e.g., Tiedens, 2001), comparing angry men workers to angry women workers (e.g., McCormick-Huhn and Shields, 2021), or by comparing angry workers to emotionless workers (e.g., Brescoll and Uhlmann, 2008). While these comparisons provide useful information, they cannot determine whether workers who express anger are penalized, or whether workers who express other emotions (e.g., sadness) are rewarded.…”

“…More recently, McCormick-Huhn and Shields (2021) compared angry white women to angry white men and found that angry women were granted more status than angry men. Thus, while Brescoll and Uhlmann (2008) argue that angry women are penalized, McCormick-Huhn and Shields (2021) argue that they are rewarded. In the current set of studies, we don't find that angry women are rewarded or penalized compared with angry men.…”

“…The previous body of work might be best characterized as a highly influential group of initial studies (Tiedens, 1998(Tiedens, , 2001Tiedens et al, 2000;Brescoll and Uhlmann, 2008), a few of which demonstrated that women were punished and men were rewarded for anger using small samples. Following these foundational findings, a group of published studies investigated questions that followed this initial finding, such as whether these results differed for non-white men and women (Livingston et al, 2012;McCormick-Huhn and Shields, 2021). These studies did not use experimental designs that could directly replicate the initial findings.…”

The intersection of race and femininity in the classroom

“…The intersection of race and femininity is a complex and multifaceted topic that has received increasing attention in recent years. Research has shown that the actions of women of color are perceived differently than those of White women in the same contexts ( McCormick-Huhn and Shields, 2021 ). Women of color are more likely to experience sexual harassment, for example, and may be more vulnerable to other forms of violence and abuse due to the juxtaposition of their race and gender identities ( Cassino and Besen-Cassino, 2019 ).…”