If I were a woman, there's little question that a series of studies, recently published he journal Psychological Science, would tick me off. Trouble is, on becoming angry, the larger share of my colleagues would assume that I'm just an angry sort of gal.

Similar outrage expressed by a man, the studies suggest, would cause onlookers to assume that external forces were at work, making him angry.

(Readers of either gender are welcome to address these injustices in the comments section at the end of this post).

Indeed, as the folks at the MindHacks Blog point out, women who express anger at the workplace are more likely to be thought of as just plain old angry people—or worse, as being "out of control"—by their colleagues. Men, on the other hand, get the benefit of the doubt, and were generally viewed more positively by evaluators.

One caveat: men who expressed sadness at the office were looked down upon as well. No crying, folks!

An abstract from the abstract:

...Both male and female evaluators conferred lower status on angry female professionals than on angry male professionals. This was the case regardless of the actual occupational rank of the target, such that both a female trainee and a female CEO were given lower status if they expressed anger than if they did not. Whereas women's emotional reactions were attributed to internal characteristics (e.g., "she is an angry person,""she is out of control"), men's emotional reactions were attributed to external circumstances. Providing an external attribution for the target person's anger eliminated the gender bias. Theoretical implications and practical applications are discussed.

As pointed out at MindHacks by Dr. Vaughn Bell, a researcher at Kings College, London, this is in keeping with other less-than-conscious, socially reinforced workplace injustices, including the proclivity among employers to view women who negotiate for pay raises to be pushy and unpleasant, while harboring no similar reaction to men who do the same.

The Washington Post covered a study dealing with this phenomenon—one spearheaded by Hannah Riley Bowles, an organizational psychologist at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government:

[The study] found that men and women get very different responses when they initiate negotiations. Although it may well be true that women often hurt themselves by not trying to negotiate, this study found that women's reluctance was based on an entirely reasonable and accurate view of how they were likely to be treated if they did. Both men and women were more likely to subtly penalize women who asked for more—the perception was that women who asked for more were "less nice."

Volunteers were asked to evaluate potential "hires" based on hypothetical descriptions of job-candidates—some of whom had negotiated for more money, some of whom had not. In the end, both men and women were viewed more negatively if they dickered over dollars.

However, dickering female job candidates were more than twice as likely to be "rejected" by experiment participants than their male counterparts. Ouch.

Photos: Oliver Uberti (top); Mariel Furlong (bottom)

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