Prescriptive Gender Stereotypes and Backlash Toward Agentic Women

TLDR

The study investigates how job descriptions and applicant traits moderate backlash against agentic women, specifically examining the influence of implicit agency‑communality stereotypes. Participants, Rutgers University students, evaluated hiring decisions for a masculine or feminized managerial role, with applicants portrayed as either agentic or androgynous. Results show that a feminized job description caused hiring discrimination against agentic women, whereas androgynous women were not discriminated, indicating that the implicit expectation of female niceness penalizes women unless they balance agency with niceness.

Abstract

In an experiment, job description and applicants' attributes were examined as moderators of the backlash effect, the negative evaluation of agentic women for violating prescriptions of feminine niceness (Rudman, 1998). Rutgers University students made hiring decisions for a masculine or “feminized” managerial job. Applicants were presented as either agentic or androgynous. Replicating Rudman and Glick (1999), a feminized job description promoted hiring discrimination against an agentic female because she was perceived as insufficiently nice. Unique to the present research, this perception was related to participants' possession of an implicit (but not explicit) agency‐communality stereotype. By contrast, androgynous female applicants were not discriminated against. The findings suggest that the prescription for female niceness is an implicit belief that penalizes women unless they temper their agency with niceness.