Kindly Póg Mo Thóin

It’s not just getting married and having kids that’ll cost you pay if you’re a woman — being perceived as “angry,” especially if you’re an executive, will get you penalized:

[Researcher Victoria Brescoll] 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.

In a second experiment, the script was similar except that the job applicant also described his or her current occupation as a trainee or a senior executive.

“Participants rated the angry female CEO as significantly less competent than all of the other targets, including even the angry female trainee,” Brescoll wrote. She said they viewed angry females as significantly more “out of control.”

That impacted salaries. Unemotional women were assigned on average $55,384 compared to $32,902 for the angry ones. Male executive candidates were assigned more than trainees, regardless of anger, with an average $73,643.

Those are some huge differences. But you can see why younger women might do better than older women overall — the less experienced, the more anger, or any emotion, gets a pass.

Interestingly, the researchers also found that having a good reason for being angry helped negate some of the penalty for women vis-a-vis unemotional women, but still didn’t bump their salaries up to the level the subjects were willing to assign to men.

Mind you, negotiating salary can also hurt women, too. So the takeaway is: be young, single, urban, don’t ask for what you deserve and be a cipher, and you might make 80% of what angry men make. Yay!

Of course, an article about women and anger can’t go without mentioning Hillary Clinton and how “angry” she allegedly is and how that’s going to hurt her. Except for who’s calling her “angry”:

[Brescoll’s] research paper “When Can Angry Women Get Ahead?” noted that Clinton was described last year by a leading Republican as “too angry to be elected president.”

That, my dear Ms. Brescoll, is known as ratfucking. And congratulations! You’ve now spread the meme that Hillary Clinton, possessor of one of the blandest affects in politics, is a seething cauldron of rage.

Perhaps that explains the pink jackets and the cleavage.

Via Bitch, Ph.D.