Perceptions of Women in Authority Positions: The Role of Warmth and Competence

Warmth has been shown to disproportionately affect how we perceive women socially, resulting in different standards for men and women in authority roles that emphasize competence. I conducted 5 studies to determine whether warmth-related traits play a more central role in the evaluations of female lecturer and politicians than their male counterparts such that women are disproportionately "punished" in perceivers' eyes for lacking warmth, but not rewarded for possessing it. In Studies 1 and 2 participants assessed the warmth, competence and overall quality of university lecturers and American politicians respectively; in Study 1 a lack of warmth was more integral to how women were evaluated than it was to how men were evaluated, but this was not replicated in Study 2. In Study 3 I analysed the content of Rate My Professor evaluations, which provided some evidence that women receive greater scrutiny than men on warmth-related dimensions. Studies 4 and 5 were content analyses of American political media sources; while these studies did not provide evidence for my hypothesis, they did provide some evidence for an oppositional relationship between warmth and competence for women but not men. Overall, these studies provide mixed support for the idea that women in authority are viewed disproportionately negatively for lacking warmth, and set the basis for future research into the role of warmth in evaluating high-status women.