Tuck Knowledge in Practice Podcast: Precarious Manhood and Flirting at Work

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Sonya Mishra: Research finds that when men do have their masculinity threatened, they go into kind of high gear to try to regain the sense of masculinity. So, some research has found that when men have their masculinity threatened, they engage in more aggressive behaviors. Other research has found that if you threaten men's masculinity, they're more likely to lie about how much weight they lift at the gym. They lie, or they express more interest in buying an SUV.

[Podcast introduction and music]

Kirk Kardashian: Hey, this is Kirk and you're listening to Knowledge and Practice, a podcast from the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth. In this podcast, we talk with Tuck professors about their research and teaching and the story behind their curiosity. This episode is a conversation with Tuck Professor Sonya. Sonya's research investigates how diversity operates within various forms of hierarchy, such as power and status, to shape social perceptions and ultimately, the workplace outcomes of underrepresented individuals. Sonya's research has been published in outlets such as Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes and the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, drawing on her expertise in organizational diversity. Sonya is responsible for designing and teaching the MBA elective Leading Diverse Organizations. In addition to her research and teaching, Sonya consults with global organizations that are committed to addressing issues of diversity, equity, and inclusion. Prior to obtaining her PhD from the University of California's Haas School of Business, Sonya studied finance at Georgetown University and worked in investment banking. In this episode, I talk with Sonya about how a man's sense of masculinity affects his reaction to being flirted with at work.

Sonya: So, a bit of background. I actually used to work as a dating coach before I started my career in academia. Before I started my PhD, and I was a dating coach in Manhattan for primarily women clients that were these women executives on Wall Street and in legal firms. And over the course of my job as a dating coach, I was there for about a year. I met with about a thousand singles, and I interviewed a thousand singles, really in depth, and I gleaned some insights on what they would look for in partners. And over and over again, I realized every time I was interviewing men, they would list all these other qualities. But when they'd finally get set up, physical attractiveness was the biggest determinant of whether or not they'd go on a second date. But for women, physical attractiveness came later. They listed all these other qualities first about personality and humor and ambition, and then physical attractiveness was just somewhere in the mix. So, I was actually in grad school. I was at a bar with my friend, and she was a postdoc researcher in my program. We were just talking about the role of physical attractiveness in men and women's perceptions of being flirted with or flirt, deciding if they want to flirt with someone. And she studied attractiveness. So, I was like, okay, we can create a cool study for my dating coach experience from your expertise on attractiveness. And that's kind of how the project was born. We were thinking about the idea of flirting at work, and of course it's seen as this really taboo thing and that men and women shouldn't flirt at work, keep things professional. But it happens. There are tons of relationships that are born out of workplace romances, so we can't just pretend this thing isn't happening.

Kirk: You know, when I read your paper, I was surprised or I guess just struck that there's an entire literature on the precarious nature of manhood. Who knew manhood was such a fragile thing? You know, like what's going on there, you you think?

Sonya: There's no such thing, really, in women's concept of femininity that makes them less of a woman. But for masculinity, there's all these things that men can do that make them, quote unquote, less of a man in the eyes of society. It just shows how masculinity is very much the socially constructed thing. Even back in the day, there's research looking at various tribes across the world, and they find that men have these rituals that they have to undergo. They have to meet these social milestones in order to transition from boyhood to manhood. But there's no real equivalent of femininity other than biological changes. So whereas femininity is considered more of a biological state, masculinity is seen as more of a social state. Since then, it's evolved in a way where you can threaten men's masculinity in really simple online formats, and it still somehow works. In this paper, we threatened men's masculinity by having men and women take this survey. That's called the gender Identity assessment. So, you're just going to fill out personality traits about yourself. Really just filler questions. And the survey will tell you whether or not your scores align with the average man's or the average woman's. No matter how participants responded, we would just randomize and tell them that their scores aligned with the average man's or the average woman's. So, when women found out their scores aligned with men, they were like, okay, we don't really care. This doesn't really affect our behavior in any way, shape or form. But when men found out that their scores aligned with the average woman's responses, it changed their psychology in a way that was it was captured in online surveys. So, something that was a really minimalistic paradigm. It was able to, you know, successfully threaten men's masculinity. And it's not something that's the fault of men, really. It's the fault of society. We kind of hold men to this unforgiving yardstick of what it means to be masculine. And if they deviate from that yardstick in the slightest way, they're suddenly told that they're less of a man, and it activates all these negative psychological consequences in men.

Kirk: So, we've established that manhood is precarious, which I think is funny, but also probably not funny. Um, so what have been some implications of this precarious manhood and why is that relevant to the workplace and relevant to the things that you study and teach?

Sonya: So, the research has found that there are these five tenets to masculinity. One of them is being financially successful. So, we can think of examples where if men lose their jobs, they feel very ashamed and they feel like they're less of a man. The other tenant is self-reliance. So, there's jokes about how men often don't ask for directions. And there's also some negative consequences of this, where you see that men are less willing to seek out mental help or things that might suggest weakness, because self-reliance is a really strong tenet of masculinity. The third one is anti-femininity. So, anything that women do, men need to steer clear from. So, caregiving would be an example of that. The fourth one is aggression. And then the last one is sexual success. So, there's a lot of research showing how men will brag about their sexual conquests to other men to bolster their own sense of masculinity. And when men are romantically associated with attractive women, then people imbue all these other positive traits onto those men. They assume that they're wealthy. They assume that they're confident or ambitious just because they're dating an attractive woman.

Speaker3: Women like that are like members of a secret tribe living in a forbidden city. People like me have not been inside in thousands of years. But with this, it's like I've already been with one of her own. My hand's been stamped. I come and go as I please.

Sonya: Research finds that when men do have their masculinity threatened, they go into kind of high gear to try to regain this sense of masculinity. So, some research has found that when men have their masculinity threatened, they engage in more aggressive behaviors.

Speaker4: To be in top physical condition for today Gary.

Sonya: Other research has found that if you threaten men's masculinity, they're more likely to lie about how much weight they lift at the gym they like or like. They express more interest in buying an SUV. So, there's a range of different behaviors that have been linked to threatening versus affirming masculinity.

Speaker5: On the freeway all men are created equal. Fortunately, all vehicles are not. Chevy Suburban like a rock.

Sonya: I wanted to see how masculinity, the sense of whether it's threatened or affirmed, how that is linked to men's reactions to being flirted with at work. So, the first study we just wanted it was a pretty simple design. We just recruited a couple hundred men into our survey, and we administered that gender identity assessment, where we gave them kind of false feedback on whether their responses aligned with the average man's or the average woman's. And then we had to have them imagine, okay, this is a coworker in your organization. We show them a photo. We said, imagine she is flirting with you at work. Imagine she asks you out for a drink and different behaviors, and they just rate how positively or negatively they would experience that behavior. Unfortunately, with this type of work, you can't really study any in-person interactions. The Institutional Review Board would not approve us having lab like research assistants go and flirt with male participants. So, we have to do it in this kind of online hypothetical format. But in that one, we basically established that link where when men had their masculinity threatened, they perceive these behaviors way more positively. In the second study, we were interested in how men's reactions to being flirted with at work differed from women's reactions. And for women, they were kind of a big no no. Across the board, you could threaten their femininity or affirm their femininity. But for women, being flirted with at work activates the sense of threat for them, because there's this long history of women being sexually harassed at work.

Sonya: And there's also a power differential between men and women at work with women. No matter what you did to their femininity, they responded negatively to all of these hypothetical scenarios. So in the second study, we're like, okay, this unique this effect seems like it's unique to men, not so much women. And then we altered the attractiveness of the women that are enacting these behaviors in the third study, because we wanted to see, okay, is this effect about just women in general and being flirted with by women, or is it specific to attractive women? Because a lot of the research shows that men pay special attention to women's attractiveness when they're evaluating if someone is a good romantic partner. Sure enough, we found that this effect was limited to perceptions of being flirted with from attractive women. And in the fourth study, we wanted to see, okay, what happens to men psychologically when they are flirted with by an attractive woman. And we found that it, sure enough, boosts their sense of masculinity. It boosts their sense of power, their sense of dominance, their sense of confidence. So it's this ego stroking behavior, essentially. And it's a fun package of studies that's just kind of establishes this link between precarious manhood and perceptions of flirting at work.

Speaker6: I have a head for business and a bod for sin. Is there anything wrong with that? No, no. 

Kirk: Did that kind of make you wonder about some of the, like, the motivations behind flirting at work and whether there's more going on there than just like, fun sexual attraction or like, is there like, sometimes an ulterior motive? You think that that women are picking up on or.

Sonya: My guess is that women are aware of this. Like, I think my hunch is that women on some level recognize that men can be manipulated by this type of behavior. But, I mean, I don't want to lean into that stereotype of women flirting their way to the top, because there's actually some research showing that men exhibit more flirtatious behavior at work than women do. So even though we have this idea in our minds of women being the office flirts, it's actually men that are more likely to be the office flirts. But with your question of if women are aware that men are more susceptible to these types of behaviors because of their sense of masculinity being catered to. I think that is the case.

Kirk: So what's the upshot for you as far as how you go about advising firms and managers for creating an inclusive, congenial workplace like that kind of flow out of this paper?

Sonya: So I would love if we could live in a world one day where these masculine traits aren't considered the default, they're not considered the best way to behave at work. Maybe we should be elevating more feminine traits like being helpful, being vulnerable, being communal. I think what the research is starting to show, especially there's research around the area of transformational leadership, which actually shows that when leaders are good at motivating others, good at empowering others, they're actually considered more effective leaders. So there's some research showing that some of these more feminine traits can actually lead to more effective leadership. So my hope is that one day we can move away from these work cultures that put masculinity on a pedestal and rather expand our notions of what a leader looks like, what success at an organization looks like. It doesn't necessarily have to be so tied to being aggressive and tough and decisive. It can. Other traits can be valued as well.

Kirk: Do you get any pushback from men saying like, why are why are you pushing on masculinity? Like, like it's not our fault we're men. You know, is there anything like is there any like challenging or pushback to the to this so much pushback?

Sonya: My whole life is pushback because, I mean, people, when they hear these types of when they hear about this research, they might feel overanalyzed or they might feel like they're being grouped to part of this average, and they're just being described in these terms of, on average, men do this. On average, men do this and they feel over scrutinized. So I've had people give me feedback, questions like, why do you hate men? I'm like, I don't hate men. I'm showing you research on how masculinity can harm men. So I do get a good amount of pushback just because this type, these these types of findings generate some sort of backlash. And I even sometimes will get backlash from women when I show them some research on how women are disadvantaged in the workplace, because sometimes seeing the numbers, because I show all of this research in my class, I show the graphs and the charts, and I try to keep it a really quantitatively focused class. But sometimes seeing the harsh reality of the extent to which your own group is disadvantaged at work and in society can result in it can shake your sense of the world. There's this concept called just world beliefs, where we like to believe that the world is a fair place and it's a meritocracy. And when people find out that they're being disadvantaged, maybe men are being constrained by masculinity, or women are dealing with a lot of gender bias. Sometimes it does result in a sense of backlash and in a type of denial. And that denial is people trying to regain their sense of control and trying to regain their sense of the world being a fair place. But yeah, I mean, unfortunately, from all the research I do, the world doesn't really seem all that fair. So that's kind of a lesson I have to get through to my students in class that we have to acknowledge that there are problems with the world if we're going to dive into this material, if we're living in the world of resistance and denial, then it's not really going to be productive for producing change.

Kirk: I'd like to thank my guest, Sonya. You can find her paper in the show notes. You've been listening to Knowledge and Practice, a podcast from the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth. Please like and subscribe to the show and if you enjoyed it, then please write a review as it helps people find the show. This show was recorded by me, Kirk. It was produced and sound designed by Tom Whalley. See you next time.

Speaker7: Yo, T-Bone. Did you produce this?

Speaker8: Sounds good. Right?