Science1 publisher2 min readPublished
Men who gossip about teammates draw lower competence ratings than women who do the same
Men who gossiped about teammates got lower competence and leadership ratings than women who did the same in three studies of students and US workers. Stereotypes about who gossips appear to limit men too when peers judge who can lead.
The Scientist · Science desk
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What happened
- The paper, by Andrea Hetrick and Lisa Marchiondo of UNM's Ellis School and Trevor Spoelma of the University of Iowa, appears in the Journal of Organizational Behavior.
- The first study followed 272 students working in 63 project teams across one semester, collecting gossip and ratings in two separate surveys.
- Prior research has typically found women penalized more than men for workplace mistreatment, the reverse of the direction seen here.
- In earlier work, Spoelma and Hetrick found that positive gossip, talking favorably about an absent colleague, could reduce social loafing and strengthen team performance.
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Why it matters
- constraint Whether lower peer ratings turn into fewer promotions or lower pay for men would take outcome data these studies did not collect, so the career cost remains an inference.
- decision Organizations that fill team-lead roles from peer impressions have a concrete reason to write selection criteria before anyone is judged.
- precedent Gender role congruity research has mostly tracked penalties to women; this result gives it grounds to test men's departures from stereotype as well.
Negative gossip in the first study was self-reported. Six weeks into the semester, students scored themselves on a five-point scale against items such as "I criticized a teammate while talking to another work teammate" [4]. Four weeks later, teammates rated one another on words including "capable," "skillful" and "competent," and on how far each person engaged in leader behavior [5]. That put the ratings at around week ten [15], in teams averaging about 4.3 people [14].
The four-week lag settles the order of events, because gossip was measured before anyone was rated. It does not settle cause. In an observed sample, men who report a given amount of gossip may differ from women reporting the same amount in other ways their teammates notice. Within these student teams, women who gossiped were rated more competent and more likely to emerge as leaders than men who gossiped [6].
Two further studies used different scenarios and samples of US workers [7]. The favorable effect for women did not appear in every study [7]. What held was the gap: men who gossiped got lower competence and leadership ratings than women who also gossiped [2]. The release does not give the worker studies' sample sizes, how the scenarios were built, or any effect sizes.
The authors connect the result to how gossip has long been coded. In a 90-year-old dictionary, "one definition linked gossip to women and even provided a quote from Chaucer that called a woman 'my gossip,'" Marchiondo said [10]. Hetrick said that gender role congruity research usually asks how women are affected when they depart from stereotype [11]. "One of the main takeaways is that gender stereotypes don't only tell women how they're supposed to behave at work; they constrain men too," she said [12].
The outcomes are perceptions inside teams. Leadership emergence here means teammates seeing someone engage in leader behavior [5]. A promotion committee or a pay review is a separate measurement. I think the result applies most directly where leaders emerge from peer impressions with no written criteria in the way. Hetrick said: "If you don't have defined objective criteria, we're more likely to lean on these subconscious stereotypes that we may have." [13]
What to watch
- Effect sizes and sample sizes in the full Journal of Organizational Behavior paper, which would show how large the ratings gap for men actually is.
- Field data linking gossip to appraisals, promotions or pay by gender, the step from peer perception to career outcome.
- A test in workplaces with formal, written leadership criteria, to see whether the gap shrinks where impressions carry less weight.