While men expressing passion for their job can improve their career prospects, it can hurt women’s, according to a recent study.
Here are four things to know:
1. The study, published Dec. 17 by the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences in Organization Science, included an analysis of 786 talent reviews from a global engineering firm and an online experiment with 1,366 participants.
2. In talent reviews of the top-quintile employees, men who expressed passion for their work were more likely to be labeled “high potential” than women.
3. In the video-based experiment, trained actors — two men and two women — portrayed employees with varying levels of passion and performance, with participants rating each actor’s leadership potential. Among reasonably high performers, the man expressing passion was more than 10 percentage points more likely to be labeled high potential than the woman showing the same passion.
4. Women expressing passion may be penalized during their careers because it can play into stereotypes of being overly emotional. Participants may have viewed the women’s emotional expressions as inappropriate for the workplace, Jon Jachimowicz, PhD, co-author of the study and an assistant professor at Harvard Business School in Boston, told The Wall Street Journal in a June 12 article.
