Inequality At Work: Anger Management

Getting angry at work may help you climb the career ladder.

But only if you are a man.

A new study shows a man who gets angry at work may well be admired for it but a woman who shows anger in the workplace is liable to be seen as "out of control" and incompetent.

What’s more, the finding may have implications for Hillary Clinton as she attempts to become the first female US president, according to its author Victoria Brescoll, a post-doctoral scholar at Yale University.

Her research paper When Can Angry Women Get Ahead?

Noted that Clinton was described last year by a leading Republican as "too angry to be elected president".

Previous research has indicated that anger can communicate that an individual feels entitled to dominate others. But Brescoll said such studies focused on men.

"As Senator Clinton’s experience suggests, however, for a professional woman anger expression may lead to a decrease rather than an increase in her status," Brescoll wrote.

She conducted three tests in which randomly recruited men and women watched videos of a job interview and were asked to rate the applicants’ status and assign them a salary.

The average salary assigned to the angry man was almost $38,000 (Dh139,573) compared with about $23,500 (Dh84,467) for the angry woman and in the region of $30,000 (Dh110,175) for the other two candidates.

In a second experiment, the script was similar except that the job applicant also described his or her current occupation as a trainee or a senior executive.

"Participants rated the angry female CEO as significantly less competent than all of the other targets, including even the angry female trainee," Brescoll wrote. She said they viewed angry females as significantly more "out of control".

Unemotional women were assigned on average $55,384 (Dh203,393) compared to $32,902 (Dh120,830) for the angry ones.

Male executive candidates were assigned more than trainees, regardless of anger, with an average $73,643 (Dh270,476).

A third experiment tested whether a good reason for anger made any difference. The script was changed so that some angry candidates explained that the co-worker who arrived late had lied beforehand, indicating he had directions to the meeting.

Sure enough, the angry woman with a good reason to be angry was awarded a higher salary than the angry woman who provided no excuse, though it was still less than the men.

• $38,000 - the salary assigned to an angry man
• $55,000 - the salary paid to an unemotional woman