High cognitive ability in women predicts workplace victimization

Women who score high on cognitive ability tests face unique social penalties in the workplace, including heightened hostility and a lack of support from their colleagues. Men with similarly high cognitive scores do not experience these same social consequences, and in some cases, they actually receive better treatment from their peers. These observations come from a recent paper published in the Journal of Applied Psychology.

In the workplace, gender continues to shape how people are evaluated and treated by their peers. According to social role theory, society holds unwritten rules about how men and women should behave. Women are traditionally expected to exhibit communal traits. Communality involves being helpful, kind, and attentive to the needs of others. Men are typically expected to display agentic traits. Agency involves being decisive, independent, competitive, and highly capable.

When individuals violate these unwritten expectations, they often face social disapproval. Past research has established that women who show dominance, by acting forcefully or aggressively, frequently face professional penalties. Yet newer studies have suggested that displaying competence, such as high intelligence, might benefit women when they are evaluated for leadership roles.

A team of researchers led by Nitya Chawla at the University of Minnesota wanted to know if this benefit extended to daily interactions with team members. They suspected that displaying high cognitive ability might actually backfire for women in everyday team settings. Cognitive ability generally refers to a person’s capacity to learn, reason, solve problems, and comprehend complex ideas.

To investigate this, Chawla and her colleagues relied on a psychological concept known as the implied communality deficit. This concept suggests that when women display high competence, their peers unconsciously assume they lack communal traits. In other words, peers might assume a highly intelligent woman is not just less warm, but actively cold or hostile. The research team suspected this dynamic would lead to fewer instances of colleagues helping out and more instances of colleagues actively victimizing the highly competent woman.

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To test these ideas, the researchers conducted two distinct investigations. The first study tracked 432 undergraduate business students at a public university in the United States. The students were divided into small teams to complete a semester-long consulting project for local organizations.

About four weeks into the semester, the students took the Wonderlic test, a standard assessment used to measure general mental ability. Seven weeks later, the participants evaluated their teammates, rating the extent to which each peer exhibited hostility or anger. A few weeks after that, the students reported how often they received help from their teammates and how often they experienced subtle forms of victimization, such as teammates withholding information.

The results showed a distinct difference in how cognitive ability affected social dynamics for men and women. For women, higher cognitive ability was linked to higher ratings of interpersonal hostility from their teammates. Because these women were perceived as more hostile, they subsequently reported experiencing more victimization.

These same women also received less help from their peers. Teammates were less likely to assist them with tasks or offer emotional support. For the men in the study, higher cognitive scores did not predict any increase in perceived hostility or changes in the amount of help or victimization they received.

For their second study, the researchers moved from a university setting to a corporate environment. They recruited 394 full-time employees working in small teams at a financial company in China. The company requires all job candidates to take a cognitive ability test during the hiring process, which provided the researchers with objective intelligence scores for each participant.

The employees completed an initial survey where they rated each of their team members on both interpersonal hostility and communality. About three weeks later, the employees completed a second survey reporting how often they were victimized by their team members and how much help they received. By separating the surveys by several weeks, the researchers aimed to capture how initial perceptions translated into workplace behaviors over time.

The findings mirrored the results of the student study while providing additional detail. Women with higher cognitive ability scores were once again viewed as more hostile by their colleagues. They were also rated as less communal than their peers.

These negative perceptions predicted worse treatment for the women. They faced more victimization and received less task-related and personal help from their colleagues. The highly competent women essentially experienced a double bind, being viewed as lacking warmth while simultaneously projecting hostility.

The men in the corporate sample experienced a completely different reality. For them, higher cognitive ability was linked to lower ratings of hostility from their peers. Because they were seen as less hostile, these men experienced less victimization and actually received more help from their teammates.

While the findings present a consistent pattern across two different cultures, the studies relied on moderate sample sizes. Additionally, the university students and the corporate employees represent highly specific environments where cognitive ability is already heavily screened. In the general population, the range of intelligence scores would be much wider, which could alter the strength of these associations.

The researchers also measured victimization and help through self-reported surveys. While peer perceptions were gathered from the teammates themselves, the actual experiences of mistreatment or support were filtered through the perspective of the individual. Future studies could use independent observations to verify how often highly competent women are actually targeted or ignored in group settings.

Finally, these findings do not account for racial or cultural intersections within a single environment. Stereotypes regarding competence and warmth differ across racial groups. Future research could explore whether women of different backgrounds experience this competence penalty differently within the same workplace.

The study, “Understanding the Intersection of Gender and Cognitive Ability on Interpersonal Outcomes: A Multistudy Investigation,” was authored by Nitya Chawla, Trevor M. Spoelma, Seo-Hyun Kwon, Allison S. Gabriel, Aleksander P. J. Ellis, and Wen Wu.