Bias against women's anger is alive and well: A large-scale test using interactions in the field
Year: 2026
Type: article
Abstract: Expressions of anger can have significant social consequences. Prior laboratory studies have shown that although men may benefit from expressing anger, women are often penalized for it. Yet, more recent experimental findings suggest that this gender-and-anger backlash effect may no longer hold consistently. These mixed results present an opportunity for competitive theory testing to distinguish between alternative accounts regarding whether and why gendered reactions to anger persist or have diminished. We systematically test gendered responses to verbal expressions of anger across ten large-scale archival datasets – spanning 67 years and over 100 million observations – that capture naturalistic emotion expressions in diverse settings, including political speeches, investor call conversations, social media posts, and online reviews. These replications in ecologically valid field data reveal that, overall, anger expressions by women elicited reactions reflecting decreased liking relative to men, yet had no consistent effect on attributed competence. Female and male responders did not differ significantly in the tendency to penalize angry women. Contrary to previous findings suggesting that gender stereotyping and discrimination are fading over time, our time trend analyses revealed no sign of decline: reactions to women’s anger grew slightly but consistently more negative relative to men’s, by about .001 standardized units per year. In sum, although society has made progress toward gender equality in many areas, prescriptive gender biases regarding anger expression remain observable in naturally emerging discourses in the field.
Institutions: Duke University, INSEAD, INSEAD
Language: English
Subfield: Sociology and Political Science
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: hybrid
Estimated APC paid: $3,530
OpenAlex ID: W7225459372