You cannot afford to get angry if you are a woman: Study

Washington, Apr 3 : Short-tempered women better watch out, for a new research has found that people accept and even reward men who get angry, but view women who lose their temper as less competent, which in turn, can make the latter lose their job.

Yale University psychologist Victoria Brescoll along with Eric Uhlmann at Northwestern University recently completed three separate studies to explore a phenomenon - where people accept men's angry behaviour but look at angry women as less competent.

The three studies provide women with recommendations for navigating emotional hazards of the workplace.

Brescoll said that paying emotionally neutral pays and, if you can't, at least explain what ticked you off in the first place.

"An angry woman loses status, no matter what her position,'' said Brescoll, who worked in Clinton's office as a Congressional Fellow in 2004 while she was preparing her doctoral thesis on gender bias.

She noticed over the years that women pay a clear price for showing anger and men don't.

In all the three studies, both men and women were shown videos of actors portraying men and women who were ostensibly applying for a job. The participants in the studies were then asked to rate applicants on how much responsibility they should be given, their perceived competence, whether they should be hired, and how much they should get paid.

In the end, both men and women reached the same conclusions: angry men deserved more status, a higher salary, and were expected to be better at the job than angry women.

When those actor/applicants expressed sadness, however, the bias was less evident, and women applicants were ranked equally to men in status and competence, but not in salary.

Then, the researchers compared angry job applicants to ones who did not display any emotion. And this time the researchers showed study participants videos of both men and women applying for lower-status jobs.

The findings were duplicated: Angry men were valued more highly than angry women no matter what level position they were applying for. However, the disparities disappeared when men and women who were emotionally neutral were ranked.

The study is published in Psychological Science.

ANI