Tag Archives: Bias

Women’s Likeability–Competence Dilemma: Overcoming the Backlash Effect

Madeline Heilman

Aaron Wallen

Women face workplace challenges when they “succeed” in traditionally-male roles, found New York University’s Madeline Heilman, Aaron Wallen, Daniella Fuchs and Melinda Tamkins.

Melinda Tamkins

They found that woman who are recognized as successful in roles dominated by men, are less liked than equally successful men in the same fields.

Tyler Okimoto

Successful women managers avoided interpersonal dislike when they conveyed “communal” attributes through behaviors, testimonials of others, or their role as mothers, found Heilman, with University of Queensland’s Tyler Okimoto.

Frank Flynn

This disconnect between women’s competence and likeability was demonstrated by Stanford’s Frank Flynn in a Harvard Business School case of Silicon Valley entrepreneur Heidi Roizen.

Heidi Roizen

He and Cameron Anderson of UC Berkeley changed Heidi’s name to “Howard Roizen” for half of the participants who read the case.

Cameron Anderson

These volunteers rated Heidi and “Howard” on perceived competence and likeability.

Heidi was rated as equally highly competent and effective as “Howard,” but she was also evaluated as unlikeable and selfish.
Most participants said they wouldn’t want to hire her or work with her.

Whitney Johnson-Lisa Joy Rosner

Whitney Johnson, co-founder of Disruptive Advisors and her colleague Lisa Joy Rosner evaluated “Brand Passion Index” (BPI) for recognisable, accomplished women over 12 months by:

Activity (number of media mentions),
Sentiment (positive or negative emotional tone),
Intensity (strong or weak sentiment).

These competent, well-known women were not liked, and were evaluated with harsh negative attributions based on media coverage and at-a-distance observations. Some were characterised as:

impressive and smart, and annoying, a bully,
excellent, successful working mom and bizarre,
amazing, successful mother and destructive, not a good wife,

Laurie Rudman

The competence-likeability dilemma was demonstrated in hiring behaviour experiments by Rutgers University’s Laurie Rudman and Peter Glick of Lawrence University.

Volunteers made “hiring decisions” for male and female “candidates” competing for a managerial role described in stereotypically feminine terms and a managerial role with more stereotypically masculine terms.

Peter Glick

Applicants were presented as demonstrating:

Stereotypically male behaviors (“agentic”)
Stereotypically female behaviors (“communal”)
Both stereotypically male and female behaviors (“androgynous”).

Women who displayed “masculine” traits were viewed as less socially acceptable and were not selected for the “feminized” job.
However, this hiring bias did not occur when these women applied for the “male” job.

“Niceness” was not rewarded when competing for jobs: Both male and female “communal” applicants received low hiring ratings.
Combining niceness with agency improved the “hiring” outcome for “androgynous” female “applicants.”

Rudman and Glick noted that “… women must present themselves as agentic to be hirable, but may therefore be seen as interpersonally deficient.”
They advised women to “temper their agency with niceness.”

Linda Babcock

The likeability-competence disconnect is also observed when women negotiate for salary and position, reported by Linda Babcock of Carnegie Mellon.
Her research demonstrated negative evaluations of women who negotiate for salaries using the same script as men.

Deborah Gruenfeld

The likeability-competence dilemma may be mitigated by integrating powerful body language with appeasing behaviors that build relationships and acknowledge others’ authority, suggested Stanford’s Deborah Gruenfeld.

She suggested that many women have been socialized to adopt less powerful body language including:

Smiling,
Nodding,
Tilting the head,
Interrupting eye contact,
Speaking in sentence fragments,
Using rising intonation at sentence endings, leading to the perception of uncertainty.

Some people in decision roles expect women to behave in these ways, and negatively evaluate behaviors that differ from expectations.

Body language is the greatest contributor to split-second judgments (less than 100 milliseconds) of people’s competence, according to Gruenfeld.
She estimated that body language is responsible for about 55% of judgments, whereas self-presentation accounts for 38%, and words for just 7%.

Her earlier work considered body language on assessments of power, and more recently, she investigated gender differences in attributions of competence and likeability.

The likeability-competence conflict may be reduced when women give up physical space to convey approachability, empathy, and likeability, she noted.

In contrast, she asserted that holding a powerful body posture for two minutes can change levels of testosterone, a marker of dominance.
She suggested that this tactic can enable greater comfort in assertive interactions.

Alison Fragale

Women’s likeability-competence dilemma is not mitigated by achieving workplace success and status.
University of North Carolina’s Alison Fragale, Benson Rosen, Carol Xu, Iryna Merideth found that successful women and men are judged more harshly for mistakes than lower status individuals who make identical errors.

Benson Rosen

Fragale’s team found that observers attributed greater intentionality, malevolence, and self-concern to the actions of high status wrongdoers than the identical actions of low status violators.
Volunteers recommended more severe punishments for higher status individuals.

Iryna Meridith

Wrongdoers who demonstrated concern for others, charitable giving, and interpersonal warmth built goodwill that could protect from subsequent mistakes.

-*How do you convey both likeability and competence?

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©Kathryn Welds

“Self-Packaging” and Appearance as Personal Brand Attributes

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Napoleon Hill

Al Ries

During the US economic Depression of the 1930s, motivational writer Napoleon Hill laid the foundation for personal positioning, described nearly forty-five years later by marketing executives Al Ries and Jack Trout in Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind.

By 1997, business writer Tom Peters introduced “personal branding” as self-packaging that communicates an individual’s accomplishments and characteristics, including appearance, as a “brand promise of value.”

Tom Peters

Self-packaging can be considered “the shell of who you are” whereas personal branding is “what sets you apart from the crowd.“

Jim Kukral

These differentiators can include visible characteristics like attire, education, experience, expertise, sense of humour, and speaking style, according to Jim Kurkal and Murray Newlands.

Daniel Lair

University of Michigan’s Daniel Lair with Katie Sullivan of University of Utah, and Kent State’s George Cheney investigated components of personal branding, presentation, and packaging.

George Cheney

They found personal branding worth analysing for its complex rhetoric tactics that shape power relations by gender, age, race, and class.

Sylvia Ann Hewlett

Sylvia Ann Hewlett of the Center for Talent Innovation identified some of these power relationships and potential biases facing women and members of minority groups who are expected to demonstrate aspects of personal branding, including executive presence.

These analyses suggest that personal packaging and branding can significantly affect professional opportunities and outcomes.

-*What elements do you consider in “personal packaging” and personal appearance?

-*How do you mitigate possible bias based on expectations for personal appearance?

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©Kathryn Welds

Executive Presence: “Gravitas,” Communication…and Appearance?

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Professional advancement requires demonstrated knowledge, skill, and competence, coupled with perceived “cultural fit,” “collaboration,” and “executive presence.”

Sylvia Ann Hewlett

These requirements appear prone to subjective definition and biased judgments.
What is “executive presence”? How is it measured?

Sylvia Ann Hewlett, CEO of Center for Talent Innovation, conducted 18 focus groups and 60 interviews to investigate behavioral and attitudinal aspects of Executive Presence (EP).

Perceived Executive Presence includes three components:

“Gravitas” – Authoritative Behavior

- Confidence, composure,
- Decisiveness,
- Integrity,
- Emotional Intelligence: Self-awareness, self-regulation, interpersonal skills,
- Personal reputation,
- Vision for leadership,

Communication

- Speaking skills: Voice tone, articulation, grammatical speech conveying competence,
- “Presence,” “bearing,” “charisma” including assertiveness, humour, humility,
- Ability to sense audience engagement, emotion, interests,

Appearance

- Grooming, posture,
- Physical attractiveness, average body weight,
- Professional attire.
  According to Hewlett’s interviewees, “Executive Presence” accounts for more than a quarter of factors that determine a next promotion.

Harrison Monarth

How can Executive Presence be developed?

Harrison Monarth suggested that Executive Presence behaviours can be cultivated with Image Management tactics including:

-Maintaining a positive personal reputation to influence others’ favourable perceptions and willingness to collaborate,

-Effectively managing online “brand”,

-Gaining followers online and in the “real world,”

-Influencing and persuading others,

-Demonstrating “Emotional Intelligence” through self-awareness, awareness of others (empathic insight), and regulating one’s own emotions.

He focused less on appearance than Hewlett and Stanford Law School’s Deborah Rhode, who summarized extensive research on Halo Effect and “The Beauty Bias”.

Deborah Rhode

Rhode estimated that annual world-wide investment in appearance was close to $USD 200 billion in 2010.
She contended that bias based on appearance influences career and life outcomes and is:

Is prevalent,
Infringes on individuals’ fundamental rights,
Compromises merit principles,
Reinforces negative stereotypes,
Compounds disadvantages facing members of non-dominant races, classes, and gender.

Executive Presence is widely recognized as a prerequisite for leadership roles, yet its components remained loosely-defined until Hewlett’s investigation and Rhode’s human rights analysis.

-*Which elements seem most essential to Executive Presence?

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©Kathryn Welds

How Much Does Appearance Matter?

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Linda A. Jackson

Physically attractive people were evaluated as more intellectually competent and likeable in a meta-analysis by Michigan State University’s Linda A. Jackson, John E. Hunter, and Carole N. Hodge.

Nancy Etcoff

Similarly, women who wore cosmetics were rated more highly on attractiveness, competence, likeability and trustworthiness when viewed for as little as 250 milliseconds by participants in studies by Harvard’s Nancy L. Etcoff, Lauren E. Haley, and David M. House, with Shannon Stock of Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, and Proctor & Gamble’s Sarah A. Vickery.

Models without makeup, with natural, professional, “glamorous” makeup

However, when participants looked at the faces for a longer time, ratings for competence and attractiveness remained the same, but ratings for likeability and trustworthiness changed based on specific makeup looks.

Etcoff’s team concluded that cosmetics could influence automatic judgments because attractiveness “rivets attention and impels actions that help ensure the survival of our genes.”

Most people recognize the bias in assuming that attractive people are competent and that unattractive people are not, yet impression management remains crucial in the workplace and in the political arena.

-*Where have you seen appearance exert an influence in workplace credibility, decision-making and role advancement?

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©Kathryn Welds

Women Who Express Anger Seen as Less Influential

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Jessica Salerno

Women who expressed anger were less likely to influence their peersin computer-mediated mock jury proceedings, found Arizona State University’s Jessica Salerno and Liana Peter-Hagene of University of Illinois.

Liana Peter-Hagene

More than 200 U.S. jury-eligible volunteers reviewed opening arguments and closing statements, eyewitness testimonies, crime scene photographs, and an image of the alleged weapon in a homicide.

Participants made individual verdict choices, then exchanged instant messages by computer, with “peers” who were said to be “deliberating their verdict decisions.”

In fact, “peer” messages were scripted, with four of the fictional jurors agreeing with the participant’s verdict, and one disagreeing.
In different test conditions, the dissenting participant had 1) a male user name or 2) a female user name or 3) a gender-neutral name.

Victoria Brescoll

Half of the dissenting messages contained no emotion, anger, or fear, and had no influence on participants’ opinions.

However, when a single “male dissenter” sent angry messages, characterized by “shouting” in all capital letters, participants’ confidence in their verdict decision significantly dropped.
This confidence-eroding effect of one “male dissenter” held even when the majority of “jurors” shared the same opinion.

A single female dissenter who expressed disagreement in an angry message did not undermine the other juror’s confidence in their decisions.

This finding suggests that a single male dissenter’s angry communication causes people to doubt their opinions, and that “female” anger was less influential than “male” anger.

In contrast, volunteers became more confident in their initial verdict decisions when their vote was echoed by the majority of other participants.

Eric Luis Uhlmann

Male and female evaluators assigned lower status to female CEOs and female trainees when they expressed anger, compared with angry male professionals in research by Yale University’s Victoria Brescoll and Eric Luis Uhlmann, now of INSEAD.

Kristi Lewis Tyran

Men who expressed anger in a professional context were conferred higher status than men who expressed sadness.

Likewise, women who expressed anger and sadness were rated less effective than women who shared no emotion, according to Kristi Lewis Tyran of Western Washington University.

Evaluators judged men’s angry reactions more generously, attributing these emotional expressions to external circumstances, such as experiencing pressure and demands from others.

These differing judgments of emotional expression suggest that women’s anger is more harshly evaluated because anger expressions deviate from women’s expected societal, gender, and cultural norms.

-*What impacts and consequences have you observed for women and men who express anger at work?

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©Kathryn Welds

Plastic Surgery Changes Perceived Personality Traits

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Michael J. Reilly

People often infer others’ personality attributes from visual cues, found Georgetown University Hospital’s Michael J. Reilly, Jaclyn A. Tomsic and Steven P. Davison, collaborating with Stephen J. Fernandez of MedStar Health Research Institute.
This facial profiling is cognitive shortcut that can lead to biased impressions and fewer professional and social opportunities for those unfavorably judged.

Jaclyn A. Tomsic

These researchers asked volunteers to evaluate photographs of 30 women shown with neutral facial expressions.

Each rater judged 10 images, including five (5) photographs before the person had plastic surgery procedures and five (5) images following surgical procedures:

Chin implant,
Eyebrow-lift,
Lower blepharoplasty (lower eye lift),
Upper blepharoplasty (upper eye lift),
Neck-lift,
Rhytidectomy (face-lift).

Raters were not informed that some people in the photos had plastic surgery procedures.

Evaluators assessed each photograph on a 7-point scale for perceived:

Aggressiveness,
Extroversion,
Likeability,
Risk-seeking,
Social skills,
Trustworthiness,
Attractiveness.

Raters assigned higher scores for likeability, social skills, and attractiveness to the images following plastic surgery compared with pre-surgery image ratings.

The researchers concluded that the eyes signal attractiveness and trustworthiness.

They noted that people who had lower eyelid surgery were rated significantly more attractive and trustworthy.

The team concluded that corner of the mouth indicates happy and surprised expressions and personality traits like extroversion.

Likewise, they reported that an upturned mouth and fullness in the cheeks can make a person look more intelligent and socially skilled.

In sum, they found that people who had a facelift procedure were rated significantly more likeable and socially skilled postoperatively.”

Volunteers in a different study attributed positive and negative personality traits to neutral faces when they perceived a similarity to standard positive and negative emotional expressions, reported Princeton’s Christopher P. Said and Alexander Todorov with Nicu Sebe of University of Trento.

Christopher P. Said

This perceptual bias was demonstrated when volunteers attributed positive personality characteristics to faces with neutral expressions when some aspect of the face resembled typical facial expressions of happiness.

Similarly, neutral faces seen attributed negative personality characteristics when they had some similarities to displays of disgust and fear.

These trait inferences resulted from overgeneralization in emotion recognition systems.

Nicu Sebe

This error can lead to misattributed personality traits and biased impressions.

However, these inaccurate and biased judgments can become more favourable after plastic surgery.

-*To what extent do people’s personality traits seems different following plastic surgery?

-*How often are people treated differently following plastic surgery?

–*What are ways to avoid confusing emotional expressions with personality traits?

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©Kathryn Welds

Reputation Affects Women’s Promotion, Earnings

1 Reply

Lily Fang

Sterling Huang

Men gain greater job benefits from professional connections than women with better education and job skills, according to INSEAD’s Lily Fang and Sterling Huang of Singapore Management University.

Lauren Cohen

Fang and Huang examined U.S. equity analysts’ alumni connections with company senior officers and board members, using a methodology developed by Harvard’s Lauren Cohen, and Christopher Malloy with Andrea Frazzini, of AQR Capital Management.

Christopher Malloy

They considered analysts’:

Year-end earnings per share (EPS) forecasts,
Buy-stock recommendations from 1993 to 2009,
Price impact of their recommendations,
Selection to “All America Research Team” (AA) by Institutional Investor magazine during the same period.
Selection to AA is based on the institutional investors’ subjective evaluation of each analyst’s industry knowledge, communication, responsiveness, and written reports.

Andrea Frazzini

Forecast accuracy is one of the least important selection criteria.
Therefore, skillful analysts may be not be selected if they are not visible and well-regarded by decision-makers.

Connections directly contributed to male analysts’ likelihood of being named to the “All America Research Team” (AA), but this relationship did not hold for female analysts.

This variance in connections by gender had significantly different financial consequences for male and female analysts because AA team members earned three times more than non-team analysts.

About 25% of all analysts shared a school tie with a senior officer or board member in the firms they covered, and these connections improved men’s forecast accuracy significantly more than women’s.

These connections also improved the impact of male analysts’ stock recommendations, measured by market reaction to their buy and sell calls.

Female analysts with a connection to a female executive at covered firms significantly improved their ranking accuracy, yet male analysts with a male connection improved their ranking accuracy almost twice as much.

Herminia Ibarra

Herminia Ibarra, then of INSEAD, also demonstrated that men in an advertising firm capitalized on network ties to improve their employment positions.

Women remain in analytical roles even if they are capable of executive roles because promotion to General Manager roles depends on subjective evaluations by current decision makers, who are usually men.

This different impact of network connections early in women’s and men’s careers could explain gender gaps that exist throughout career trajectories.

Fang and Huang concluded that men and women may be evaluated using separate subjective criteria, resulting in differential career advancement for women and men.

Ronald Burt

Career-related social connections (“social capital”) are affected by legitimacy, reputation, and network structures, argued University of Chicago’s Ronald Burt.
He suggested that “holes” in a social network are gaps in connections between two people or groups.
Anyone who builds a bridging relationship across this gap is considered a “broker.”

This role offers “entrepreneurial opportunities” to access information and shape communications across groups.
Women who fill “network holes” increase their possibility of advancement.

Burt noted limitations to this approach for women: “…because women are not accepted as legitimate members of the population of highly promotable candidates.”

He noted that women and minorities succeed by leveraging the network of legitimate strategic partners, suggesting the importance of sponsors for underrepresented groups.

-How do you identify and fill “structural holes in social capital networks”?

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Nothing to Lose: Effective Negotiating Even When “Powerless”

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Most negotiators prefer to have a “fall back position.”
However INSEAD’s Michael Schaerer and Roderick Swaab with Adam Galinsky of Columbia found that having no alternatives and less power than co-negotiators can improve outcomes.

A weak alternative can establish an unfavourably modest “anchor point ,” according to Hebrew University’s late Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman of Princeton.

These “lowball” first offers usually undermine a negotiator’s final outcome.

Professional athletes and their agents provided examples of negotiating better deals when they had no “back up” offers and “nothing to lose.” They set more ambitious anchor points, and often negotiate a more favourable settlement.

Schaerer and team asked a hundred people whether they would prefer to negotiate a job offer with a weak alternate offer or without any alternative.
More than 90 percent of participants preferred an unattractive alternative offer, confirming that any alternative is usually seen as better than no alternative.

Schaerer asked volunteers to sell previously-owned music when they had:

No offers (no alternative),
One offer at USD $2 (weak alternative),
A bid at USD $8 (strong alternative).

Volunteers in each group proposed a first offer, and rated the degree of power they felt.
People with the “strong” alternative felt most powerful and those with no alternative felt least powerful.

Volunteers with a weak alternative felt more powerful than those with no alternative, but they made lower first offers.
This indicated that they had less confidence than participants with no alternative.

Conclusion: Having any alternative can help people feel powerful but can undermine negotiation performance.

Schaerer’s team asked a volunteer to “sell” a coffee mug to a potential “buyer,” who was a confederate of the researchers.

The volunteer “seller” received a phone call from “another buyer,” who was a confederate of the researchers, before the volunteer seller met the original potential buyer.
When half the “sellers” met the original purchase prospect, the “buyer” made a low offer.
The “buyer” declined to bid for the other half of “sellers.”

Sellers without an alternative offer said they felt less powerful, but made higher first offers and received significantly higher sales prices than negotiators with an unattractive alternative.

In another situation, half of the “sellers” concentrated on available alternatives (none, weak, or strong) and the remaining negotiators focused on the target price.

Volunteers with unappealing alternatives negotiated worse deals than those with no options when they focused on alternatives.
“Sellers” avoided this pitfall by concentrating on the target price.
Conclusion: Focus on the goal when alternatives are weak.

Negotiators with non-existent or unappealing alternatives can set audacious goals and make an ambitious opening offer because they have “nothing to lose.”
This strategy usually renders better results for the disadvantaged negotiator.

How do you overcome lowball anchoring when you have few negotiation alternatives?

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Precise Negotiation Offers Yield Better Bargaining Results

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Malia F Mason

Opening negotiation offers usually anchor the discussion and shape settlement values.
Many people make opening offers in “round” numbers like USD$10 instead of “precise” numbers like USD$9.
This strategy rendered less effective results in negotiation experiments, reported Columbia’s Malia Mason, Alice J. Lee, Elizabeth A. Wiley, and Daniel Ames.

Y Charles Zhang

Negotiators can improve negotiation outcomes by specifying offers in precise values because they more potently anchor the negotiation range.
In addition, negotiators who proposed precise offers were perceived as more confident, credible, and “well-informed” regarding actual value.

Norbert Schwartz

In a study of consumer confidence in various offer types, University of Michigan’s Y. Charles Zhang and Norbert Schwarz of University of Southern California reported that some recipients of precise offers viewed these proposals as “inflexible.“

However, recipients of precise offers made more conciliatory counter-offers with smaller adjustments and more favorable final settlements.
Precise offers were associated with more favourable final deals even when the negotiator opened with a less ambitious precise offer.

Martin Schweinsberg

Precise offers are less likely to be seen as “aggressive” by a co-negotiator, according to INSEAD’s Martin Schweinsberg collaborating with Gillian Ku and Madan M. Pillutla of London Business School’s and Cynthia S. Wang of Oklahoma State University.
This enables negotiators to present ambitious first offers while avoiding “offending” a negotiation partner and stalling progress toward settlement.

Gillian Ku

This risk of stalemated negotiation increases if negotiators see themselves in a lower-power position and receive an extreme offer.
These negotiators may be more willing to end negotiations,

Manoj Thomas

Precise offers can obscure their actual value, noted Cornell’s Manoj Thomas and Vrinda Kadiyali with Daniel H. Simon of Indiana University.
Buyers underestimated the size of precise prices, particularly under uncertain conditions: U.S. homebuyers paid more when list prices were precise.

Vrinda Kadiyali

Precise offers provide some of the benefits of favorably anchoring negotiation discussions while reducing risks of “offensive” extreme offers.

-*How effective have you found “precise” opening offers in achieving your negotiation goals?

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Acknowledge Employer Appearance “Concerns” to Get Job Offer

Kathryn Welds, PhD | Curated Research + Commentary

Consulting Organizational Psychologist | Change Consultant | Leadership+Career Master Coach | Coach Supervisor+Mentor Coach |

Tag Archives: Bias

“Self-Packaging” and Appearance as Personal Brand Attributes

Executive Presence: “Gravitas,” Communication…and Appearance?

How Much Does Appearance Matter?

Women Who Express Anger Seen as Less Influential

Plastic Surgery Changes Perceived Personality Traits

Nothing to Lose: Effective Negotiating Even When “Powerless”

Precise Negotiation Offers Yield Better Bargaining Results

Acknowledge Employer Appearance “Concerns” to Get Job Offer

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