Are Women Cattier than Men?

The perception that women are cattier with each other than men are with other men is a prevalent one. Old-school research like the Queen Bee theory, in which a woman who has succeeded in her career refuses to help other women do the same, is often touted as fact. But does any recent research support this stereotype? When it comes to incivility at work, does gender play a role? Research, such as that found in the Journal of Management entitled "Selective Incivility as Modern Discrimination in Organizations," has shown that women report more experiences of incivility at work than men, but is it women or men who target them with rude remarks? Allison Gabriel, assistant professor of management and organizations in the University of Arizona's Eller College of Management, set out to answer that question across three studies with her co-authors. The work, "Further Understanding Incivility in the Workplace: The Effects of Gender, Agency and Communion," is to be published in the Journal of Applied Psychology. In the study, men and women answered questions about the incivility they experienced at work. Each set of questions was answered twice, once for male co-workers and once for female co-workers. The study revealed that more often than not, it was women who were being uncivil to women. We spoke to Gabriel about her work. Fletcher: Can you explain what incivility means? Gabriel: These are not the behaviours that employees would hear about in an HR training ... What they are is low-intensity and kind of ambiguous to experience. These are the rude comments in a meeting, feeling excluded from a conversation, being addressed unprofessionally, either privately, or publicly in a big forum. It's essentially just feeling like you're experiencing this rude, discourteous treatment. These are things that happen day-in and day-out, and when we experience them they're ambiguous in that they make you pause and say, "Well, wait a second. What was that? Why did that person say that to me? Is there a problem here?" That experience can be very draining for employees to experience day-to-day. Fletcher: What sparked your interest in women at work with other women? Gabriel: I've always been interested in employee well-being and how different forms of mistreatment might contribute to it. Michael Sliter was a colleague of mine who has similar interests. We noticed that women were typically reporting higher levels of incivility than their male counterparts. There were lots of ideas floating around about who might be perpetrating that incivility, but nobody had assessed it. So, we thought we should figure out who the instigators of these experiences are if we want to inform practice and help women have more positive experiences in the workplace. More anecdotally, I've had female friends and colleagues who have noted instances where they've had these really rude, discourteous interactions with women. I think this is a phenomenon that people have unfortunately experienced ... With our research we wanted to see if we could determine what was going on: if it's women instigating it or men instigating it. That way we can have a more informed discussion moving forward. Fletcher: Did you have any kind of hunch that women would be more uncivil to other women? Gabriel: We really didn't. In the paper, we set up the very first study with these competing ideas and we didn't know what was going to shake out. On the one hand, there's the idea that women represent more of the outgroup in organizations and men the more dominant social group. It might be that if I'm a female in the workplace, I'm probably going to compare myself to other women. Study after study - we had three studies in the project - we kept replicating the same effect that incivility was predominantly being reported from other women. It's probably an important caveat to note that men aren't off the hook here, but when we looked at the base rates at which people were reporting this, it was pretty consistent that men weren't really differentiating these two experiences whereas women were very consistently differentiating them. Fletcher: Which kinds of women are getting the most uncivil behaviour? Gabriel: You know, I've been talking about this research a lot, and people are asking, "Are you sad or upset to write this story?" and the answer is absolutely. You never want to find results that your female counterparts are going through this. The finding that made me the most distraught was that there were women who were self-reporting being more dominant and self-assertive at work, and they were the ones being more frequently targeted by their female counterparts. In one study, we had women self-identity different traits that aligned with this more assertive personality at work, and then in the other study we had women self-report different behaviours they were engaging in. They were very simple things like speaking up and assigning a task to somebody. Those women were more likely to be targeted by female incivility. When people were lower on those traits the base rates were not as strong. Fletcher: We've talked about the targets of incivility, but is there a profile of the kind of woman who would be uncivil to other women? Gabriel: That's a really interesting question. That's something that we don't know yet, but it's something that I'm interested in trying to figure out - what is it about these female-female relationships that could predict or explain why a particular woman might feel like she might need to compete with another female in the workplace. Maybe it's not a profile of a personality that makes somebody susceptible, but maybe it's something about the environment. If it's the perception that resources are really scarce and everybody's in competition and a threat to me, that might make me more sensitive to women acting differently than I'm acting. It would be nice to know if it's a personality trait or if it's signals from the environment or the organization. Fletcher: Do women in positions of power tend to try to help other women? Gabriel: Historically, there is some research that would say "no." There was a phenomenon documented way back called the Queen Bee phenomenon. They call it that because in honeybee colonies there is the queen bee, who has all of the power and uses that power and influence to stave off competition from other female bees in the colony. There has been evidence suggesting that women - a lot of this is experimental, but still - when women have power they are more likely to discriminate against other women in hypothetical job scenarios. There is some research suggesting that women may not be as supportive of their female counterparts. I'm hoping ... more studies are done about what happens when women lift other women up. Fletcher: What kind of interventions can companies enact? Gabriel: There has been some recent intervention-type work done to try to address this issue. There was a study done with the veteran hospital system a few years ago. What they did was create weekly and bi-weekly meetings where employees got together and talked about civility in organizations. They were talking about the effects of being treated uncivilly - having people speak to these incidents and experiences. They found that by just addressing it, and talking about it, employees started to report lower levels of incivility at work. I think this is very broad and it doesn't just have to be about women. A lot of times when these experiences happen to us, we maybe say, "Hey, I'm making a big deal about this, and maybe this is me getting worked up over nothing." But we know that these little experiences accumulate over time and add up to a big issue for people. Some organizations are ... encouraging dialogue about this. That way when employees become more aware of the experiences of others and of what can do to their fellow colleagues, the rates of those experiences start to go down a little bit.

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