Are women still punished for being angry in the workplace?

It's no secret that women are often held to a higher standard of behavior in the workplace than their male counterparts. But when workplace tensions boil over, who gets a bigger share of the blame? 

According to a survey by professional development platform, Crucial Learning, both men and women get dinged for their professionalism when losing their temper at work. But there's some good news: After conducting the survey in 2016, where women were penalized significantly more, Crucial Learning's latest study found that women and men suffered the consequences equally.  

Crucial Learning surveyed over 2,000 employees nationwide, examining their responses to a video showing a woman and man in an office expressing frustrated or aggressive behavior. Respondents scored the man and woman based on perceived competency. Following a similar 2016 study, Crucial Learning wanted to test whether employees would continue to penalize women more than men for their anger. When viewers were shown a video of a man acting forcefully, raising his voice and being more demanding of the listener, the man's competency score fell to 4.4 out of nine points; the woman's score was five points out of nine. In 2016, women overwhelmingly scored lower than men. 

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"There's a persistent and troubling double standard that women face, where it's harder for women to speak up in the workplace about tough issues," says Emily Gregory, co-author of the report and consultant at Crucial Learning. "But this data actually shows that the man might be taking just a little bit more of a hit than the woman, and are being assessed equally for speaking up with force."

Notably, respondents also listed adjectives they believe best described the angry man and woman, offering an ever deeper look into how their behavior was received. The woman (named Sharon in the study) was given adjectives like assertive, direct, determined, strong and confident. On the other hand, the man (otherwise known as Trent) was called stubborn, passionate, aggressive, determined and rude. This further underlines that the perception of gender in the workplace is changing: Women are not seen as negatively for speaking up and being blunt, while men are being given less slack, explains Gregory.

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"I'm so grateful the word 'bossy' was nowhere on Sharon's list of adjectives," she says. "I was really excited to see us become more neutral in our adjectives to describe women."

While the study doesn't explore why perception has changed so much since 2016, Gregory hypothesizes that women are much more visible in professional spaces and political movements than they were even just a few decades ago. Social media has only emphasized that visibility, showing women taking charge for causes like Black Lives Matter and the Me Too movement. Essentially, Gregory believes forceful women have become more normalized. 

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Still, regardless of gender, aggression, frustration and impatience can hinder progress in the workplace, and Gregory encourages workers to reflect on how they communicate and, more importantly, disagree with their colleagues. She advises employees to preface a workplace debate with a verbal agreement to hear and try to understand their colleague's perspective and then ask if the colleague is open to hearing their own. If people feel threatened in a conversation, then they are more likely to respond with anger, explains Gregory. 

"Often force comes from a place where there's a lack of safety," she says. "You always want to pay attention to what's happening to the feeling of safety in a conversation."