Backlashes Or Boosts? How Warmth and Gender Stereotypes Interact To Predict Hireability

Both men and women who violate gender stereotypes incur backlashes, or penalties, for these transgressions. However, men who engage in warm, communal behaviors occasionally receive a boost (or benefit) for this female-stereotyped behavior. To understand how and why warmth and gender interact to predict backlashes or boosts, we integrate uncertainty reduction theory with the stereotype content model and examine warmth by gender interactions. In our first study, we find that men receive a boost in hireability for exhibiting gender incongruent (i.e., high) levels of warmth, but women do not receive a backlash in hireability for exhibiting gender incongruent (i.e., low) levels of warmth. In our second study, we replicate and extend these findings by elucidating why they occur: warmth reduces relational uncertainty for male, but not female, applicants. In our third study, we again replicate and extend our findings by identifying when these effects are stronger: in male-dominated roles.