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Middle-aged women are seen as less 'nice' than men and it's probably costing them high-paying jobs, a new paper found

Businesswoman working on laptop in office
Businesswoman working on laptop in office Getty Images

  • Middle-aged women are seen as less 'nice' than men at work, a new research paper found. 
  • Although middle-aged women are considered more competent, they rank lower on traits like 'warmth.'
  • Self-assured women are 'automatically seen as less nice,' co-author Jennifer Chatman explained. 
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Middle-aged women are seen as less "nice" at work than middle-aged men, a new research paper has found. 

The paper, published in the Journal of Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, found that both male and female professionals were considered more competent and skilled as they age, but only women were rated as "declining in warmth" as they got older. 

The researchers recruited 1,600 people based in the US to participate in three studies designed to investigate how perceptions of professional women changed as they aged, in comparison to men. 

"Women are most stereotyped and discriminated against in middle age," said Jennifer Chatman, professor at Haas School of Business and one of the paper's co-authors.

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Chatman noted that the study might explain why there is still such a "persistent lack" of women in top positions at organizations like Fortune 500 companies. 

She said: "The study shows that middle age is a particularly precarious time for women. They are viewed as most counter-stereotypic and as a result, their performance evaluations are undermined. This is so important because it's the middle of a person's career when they're being groomed for potentially the top jobs in organizations. 

"So if women are viewed as performing worse, systematically based on bias, then they are systematically going to be less likely to be groomed for these top positions and less likely to move into CEO kinds of roles."

Middle-aged women rank lower on warmth because they have more agency 

In one of the three studies, 999 participants living in the US took part in an experiment between 2020 and 2021 to share opinions on male and female professionals as they aged. 

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Participants were presented with an identical fictitious profile and image of either a male or female product manager at a tech company, by the name of Steve Wilson or Sue Miller. Half the participants were given a profile of 46-year-old Steve or Sue and asked to imagine them at 29 years old, whilst the other half had a 29-year-old profile of both and were asked to imagine them at 46. 

Participants ranked the profiles on characteristics like "forceful" or "gentle." Researchers found that both men and women were seen as growing more competent from adulthood to middle age, but there was a greater difference in perceptions of women as "warm" as they age than men. Middle-aged women were seen as less warm. 

Chatman said women have "a narrow band of acceptable behavior," so as they grow more confident and self-assured with age "they are automatically viewed as less nice."

She said: "Warmth is a gender-intensified attribute for women meaning that they are absolutely expected to be nice and when they violate that niceness prescription, they are penalized and there's backlash for that." 

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Chatman said these biases link back to "hunter-gatherer times" when men were expected to hunt and protect whilst women were responsible for child-bearing. 

"These stereotypes that have emerged from what are now obsolete roles, and have persisted even though they are not accurate," she said. 

"The problem is that work is really associated with agency so for men there's no incompatibility between their stereotypic expectations, and what they need to do at work. 

"But for women being agentic is viewed as counter-stereotypic, so there's an immediate incompatibility with women at work, to begin with." 

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Chatman's study confirms age-old biases that assertive women are seen as less likable and bossier. In Sheryl Sandberg's 2013 book "Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead," she cited an experiment conducted in 2003 at Columbia Business School and New York University. The experiment duplicated résumés from a successful female entrepreneur with an extroverted personality named Heidi. 

Some of the résumés had Heidi's name and others had a man's name, Howard. Business students were made to read either Heidi's or Howard's résumé. The students said that Heidi and Howard were equally competent but Howard was seen as likable and a team player whereas Heidi was seen as aggressive and competitive. 

These perceptions hold middle-aged women back at work

Another study in the paper showed that middle-aged women being seen as less "nice" or "warm" resulted in more negative performance evaluations. The study tracked the performance evaluations of 126 professors at US business schools between 2003 and 2018, using reviews from 59,600 MBA students. 

Middle-aged female professors received more negative performance evaluations than younger or older female professors with words like "caring", "nice" or "helpful'' in reviews declining as they age. Meanwhile, male professors' performance evaluations only increased as they aged. 

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Chatman said raising awareness about the findings of the study will help counteract these biases. She advised organizations to hold men and women to the same standards of behavior so that "a woman's critical comment is not viewed as somehow more critical than a man's critical comment." 

Removing bias from performance evaluations is also a step towards more gender equality at work. 

"Performance evaluations are highly gendered in their evaluation," said Chatman. "So what that means is they conjure the stereotypes of gender and then women would lose in that comparison. Find more neutral terms on which men and women are evaluated so that there's a much more fair playing field."

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