Risky Work Situations Increase Women's Anxiety, Hurt Performance

Risky situations increase anxiety for women but not for men, leading women to perform worse under these circumstances, according to a new study presented at the 109th Annual Meeting of the American Sociological Association.

"On the surface, risky situations may not appear to be particularly disadvantageous to women, but these findings suggest otherwise," said study author Susan R Fisk, a doctoral candidate in sociology at Stanford University.

According to Fisk, people often think of an extreme physical or financial risk when they think about a "risky situation." Yet, in reality, people encounter risky situations all of the time. Fisk cites raising one's hand to offer an idea at a meeting full of judgmental co-workers, giving a boss feedback on his or her performance, and volunteering for a difficult workplace assignment as examples of risky situations.

In the study, Fisk relied on data from three sources: two experiments and test scores from an engineering course at a private university on the West Coast of the U.S.

The goal of the first experiment, which was conducted online using U.S. adults ranging in age from 18 to 81, was to determine whether risky workplace situations increased the anxiety of women and men. In this experiment, participants were given one of four scenarios presented in either a risky or non-risky way.

For instance, participants who were asked to imagine a work-related group meeting were either told that the other members of the group understood that bad ideas were part of the brain-storming process (the non-risky framing) or that the other group members were extremely judgmental of bad ideas (the risky framing).

After reading their scenario, participants were asked to think and write about the reasoning they would use to decide what to do in the situation they received, how they believed they would act in the situation, and how the situation would make them feel.

After participants finished thinking and writing about their scenario, they took an anxiety test. Fisk found that when scenarios were framed in a risky way, women were more anxious than when the scenarios were framed in a non-risky way.

Women who received risky scenarios scored 13.6 per cent higher on the anxiety test than those who received non-risky scenarios. Increased anxiety in risky settings is problematic for women because it may depress their ability to achieve, as Fisk also found that women have worse task performance than men in risky situations, even when they have the same ability in a non-risky setting.

"Prior research suggests that even if a woman has the same objective performance as a man, others are likely to judge her performance as worse and attribute her failure to incompetence instead of poor luck," Fisk explained. "Furthermore, this body of research suggests that even absent the judgment of others, failure in a risky situation is more costly to women as it may reinforce or create self-doubt about their own competence."

Fisk believes that women's anxiety and poorer performance in risky situations may be an unexplored contributor to the dearth of women in positions of leadership and power, as success in these kinds of circumstances is often a precursor to career advancement and promotion.

"My findings have troublesome implications for women's ability to achieve equality in the workplace," Fisk said. "People frequently encounter high-risk, high-reward situations in workplaces, and if women avoid these situations or perform more poorly in them because they are more anxious, they will reap fewer rewards than otherwise similar men."

The research was presented at a meeting of the American Sociological Association in San Francisco.