Women's Incivility to Women

We are currently engaged in a great national conversation about why women do not do better at work. The first hypothesis blamed it on motherhood.  A woman without children was likely to do as well as any man. A woman with children was likely to want to spend more time away from work and the office. Thus they had different career paths.

The second hypothesis was sexual harassment. Many women have recently reported being sexually harassed in the workplace. They felt belittled and demeaned by it, and this fact in and of itself made it more difficult for them to do their jobs.

The third hypothesis, brought to us by Allison Gabriel, an assistant professor at the University of Arizona’s Eller College of Management, involves women’s incivility to other women. This aspect of the problem has generally been ignored, because it does not fit the sisterhood narrative.

Gabriel discovered that women were more rude to other women than to men. And that men were less rude to women than other women were. I have heard such stories for quite some time now, but it is better to go beyond the anecdotal.

Government Executive reports on the research:

[Gabriel’s] questions were about coworkers who put them down or were condescending, made demeaning or derogatory remarks, ignored them in a meeting, or addressed them in unprofessional terms. Each set of questions was answered twice, once for male coworkers and once for female coworkers.

“Across the three studies, we found consistent evidence that women reported higher levels of incivility from other women than their male counterparts,” Gabriel says. “In other words, women are ruder to each other than they are to men, or than men are to women.

“This isn’t to say men were off the hook or they weren’t engaging in these behaviors,” she notes. “But when we compared the average levels of incivility reported, female-instigated incivility was reported more often than male-instigated incivility by women in our three studies.”

Amusingly, women who leaned in, who were more assertive, were more often attacked by their female counterparts. One can only wonder what Sheryl Sandberg thinks of this:

The research shows that women who defied gender norms by being more assertive and dominant at work were more likely to be targeted by their female counterparts, compared to women who exhibited fewer of those traits.

The researchers also found that when men acted assertive and warm—in general, not considered the norm for male behavior—they reported lower incivility from their male counterparts.

This suggests men actually get a social credit for partially deviating from their gender stereotypes, a benefit that women are not afforded.

One might question the definition of gender stereotypes at play here. Why does anyone think that men must always be assertive and should never show kindness? Doesn't the term gentleman suggest otherwise?

To conclude, if we ask about the price of women’s incivility to other women we discover that it damages women’s job and career prospects:

Evidence emerged in the three studies that companies may face a greater risk of losing female employees who experience female-instigated incivility, as they reported less satisfaction at work and increased intentions to quit their current jobs in response to these unpleasant experiences. Paired with estimates that incivility can cost organizations an estimated $14,000 per employee, this presents a problem for organizations.