Jennifer Chatman, a tenured professor at UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business, noticed something weird happening with her student after she turned 40. Her student class evaluations started getting worse despite her feeling at the top of her career and having more expertise than ever.
“If anything, my teaching was getting even better, but students were harder on me,”She told Mirage News.
When she brought it up to her middle-aged female colleagues, they described the same experiences—but her male colleagues did not.
Intriguing, she decided to collect more than anecdotal evidence so she created a three-part study. Published in the journal Organizational Behavior and Human Decision MakingIn November 2022.
Evidence from Empirical Studies of A Niceness Bias
Chatman and her coauthors concluded that men and women are both perceived as capable with age. However, women are viewed as capable. “less warm”As they age, their work performance is less predictable.
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How did she reach this conclusion? Participants were shown headshots of possible supervisors at a tech firm and given the same information about each. Next, participants were asked to rate the experience. “Steve” “Sue” on various adjectives like “forceful” “gentle”In middle age, they are older than when they were young.
Both were higher rated for their characteristics. “agency”As they grew older, Sue was rated lower for characteristics related to “warmth.”
“It’s just stunning,”Chatman spoke Mirage News. “These stereotypes are so hard-wired and deeply entrenched that they come out even when absolutely identical information is provided about a man and a woman.”
For Chatman’s second study her team asked 500 executives in leadership roles to have their real-life colleagues perform an assessment that measured different attributes, including assertiveness and agreeableness
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The results showed that women’s warmth was perceived consistently as they aged, but men were considered to be warmer as they got older. Although the results were not as striking, these findings could have a negative impact on women when compared to men their age.
A third study examined the evaluations of university professors over time. While the male professors’ evaluations remained consistent, evaluations of female professors peaked in their 30s then quickly declined, bottoming out at around age 47.
Surprisingly after this, the evaluations were more favorable and they had similar reviews to their male counterparts by their early 60s. This seems to suggest that women are discriminated in their midlife.
What does this mean for working women?
Research has shown that women are less likely to feel confident and competent as they gain more experience. “niceness”Her back can be a problem. It isn’t for women to try and be nicer in their midlife.
Instead, they concluded that education and awareness about these stereotypes could help to remove some of the barriers that keep women from achieving their full potential in the workplace.