A depressing new study published in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin found that male employees felt threatened by female bosses, New York Mag reports.
The study, which was led by Ekaterina Netchaeva of Bocconi University in Milan, looked at 76 students, with 52 of them being men and 24 being women, with an average age of 23. They had participants negotiate a starting salary with a hypothetical male or female boss, and found that men with female bosses tended to ask for about $6,500 more during those negotiations than when they thought the hiring manager was male. Women, however, had the same reaction to either gender boss and asked for an average of $5,000 less than men asked for, showcasing once again that men think they're worth far more than women think they're worth.
Researchers were interested in finding out if this meant that men were discriminating against all women or just women in positions of power above them, so they did another experiment involving 68 male students choosing how much of a $10,000 bonus they should split with a male or female manager, or a male or female coworker. Men offered to share more of the bonus with male managers than female managers, but mostly offered to share the same amount of money with either male or female coworkers, suggesting that they viewed their female coworkers as equals but female bosses as threatening.
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A follow-up experiment found that both men and women felt emasculated by female managers who were "committed to climbing the corporate ladder, striving to reach the top, and is tireless in her determination," but even then, men still kept more of the $10,000 bonus from the female ambitious boss than the male ambitious boss, so it seems that ambition is still valued in men and not in women.
While it's slightly reassuring that men are theoretically beginning to view their female coworkers as their equals, it's still upsetting that this is as far as our social progress has gone. Even if men can respect women as equals, it looks as though they cannot respect them as leaders or superiors in the way that they can with men, which means that even if your male coworker loves you to death and would split that hypothetical bonus with you, he would view you differently and give you less money if you ever became promoted above him.
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