DATE: October 17, 2026 at 11:00AM
SOURCE: PSYPOST.ORG
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TITLE: Women with high cognitive ability tend to be seen as more hostile by teammates and report more mistreatment
URL: https://www.psypost.org/highly-competent-women-face-hidden-social-penalties-in-the-workplace/
Women who score high on cognitive ability tests tend to be seen as more hostile by their teammates, and they report more mistreatment and less help from those colleagues. Men with similarly high scores do not show this pattern, and in one sample they actually reported better treatment from their peers. The findings, published in the Journal of Applied Psychology, suggest that gender stereotypes may shape how colleagues respond to intelligence.
Cognitive ability generally refers to a person’s capacity to learn, reason, solve problems, and comprehend complex ideas. In the workplace, gender continues to shape how people are evaluated and treated by their peers. According to social role theory, society holds unwritten rules about how men and women should behave.
Women are traditionally expected to exhibit communal traits, which involve being helpful, kind, and attentive to the needs of others. Men are typically expected to display agentic traits, which involve being decisive, independent, competitive, and highly capable.
When individuals violate these unwritten expectations, they often face social disapproval. Past research has established that women who show dominance, by acting forcefully or aggressively, frequently face professional penalties. Yet newer studies have suggested that displaying competence, such as high intelligence, might benefit women when they are evaluated for leadership roles.
A team of researchers led by Nitya Chawla of the Carlson School of Management at the University of Minnesota wanted to know if this benefit extended to daily interactions with team members. They suspected that having high cognitive ability might actually backfire for women in everyday team settings.
“We tend to think of intelligence as an inherently positive attribute in the workplace,” Chawla told PsyPost. “Being perceived as intelligent should, in theory, earn individuals greater respect, support, and recognition. And, there is increasing research to suggest that in leadership contexts specifically, there is a benefit to intelligence for women.”
“However, we were interested to understand whether these benefits are equally present when considering interpersonal experiences with one’s peers and colleagues specifically—that is, those who work alongside them on a day-to-day basis, rather than those who lead (or have the potential to lead),” she explained.
To investigate this, Chawla and her colleagues relied on a psychological concept known as the implied communality deficit. This concept suggests that when women display high competence, their peers unconsciously assume they lack communal traits. In other words, peers might assume a highly intelligent woman is not just less warm, but actively cold or hostile. The research team suspected this dynamic would lead to fewer instances of colleagues helping out and more instances of colleagues actively victimizing the highly competent woman.
To test these ideas, the researchers conducted two distinct investigations. The first study tracked 432 undergraduate business students at a public university in the United States. The students were divided into small teams to complete a semester-long consulting project for real organizations, ranging from Fortune 500 companies to local nonprofits.
About four weeks into the semester, the students took the Wonderlic test, a standard assessment used to measure general mental ability. Seven weeks later, the participants evaluated their teammates, rating the extent to which each peer exhibited hostility or anger. A few weeks after that, the students reported how often they received help from their teammates and how often they experienced subtle forms of victimization, such as teammates withholding information.
The results showed a distinct difference in how cognitive ability related to social dynamics for men and women. For women, higher cognitive ability was linked to higher ratings of interpersonal hostility from their teammates. Being perceived as more hostile was in turn linked to reporting more victimization.
These same women also reported receiving less help from teammates, both with tasks and with emotional support. For the men in the study, higher cognitive scores did not predict any increase in perceived hostility or changes in the amount of help or victimization they received.
The researchers excluded two students whose test scores were extremely low, reasoning that they likely did not take the test seriously. With those students included, the difference between men and women was no longer statistically significant, although women with higher scores were still rated as more hostile.
For their second study, the researchers moved from a university setting to a corporate environment. They recruited 394 full-time employees working in small teams at a financial company in China. The company requires all job candidates to take a cognitive ability test during the hiring process, which provided the researchers with objective intelligence scores for each participant.
The employees completed an initial survey where they rated each of their team members on both interpersonal hostility and communality. About three weeks later, the employees completed a second survey reporting how often they were victimized by their team members and how much help they received. By separating the surveys by several weeks, the researchers aimed to examine whether initial perceptions were linked to later treatment.
The findings mirrored the results of the student study while providing additional detail. Women with higher cognitive ability scores were once again viewed as more hostile by their colleagues. They were also rated as less communal.
Both perceptions were linked to worse treatment. Being seen as more hostile went along with more victimization and less task-related and personal help, while being seen as less communal was tied to more victimization but not to the amount of help women received. The authors describe this as a double bind, in which higher-scoring women were seen as both lacking warmth and actively hostile.
The men in the corporate sample experienced a different pattern. For them, higher cognitive ability was linked to lower ratings of hostility from their peers. Being seen as less hostile was in turn linked to less victimization and more help from their teammates.
This differed from the student sample, where men’s test scores were unrelated to how they were seen or treated. The authors suggest cultural differences may play a role, noting that in cultures with traditional gender norms, men with lower ability may be seen as falling short of masculine expectations.
The researchers statistically accounted for several of participants’ own traits that might color how others see them, including positive and negative emotional tendencies and paranoia in the student sample and a tendency toward anger in the corporate sample. They also tested whether ratings of domineering behavior explained the results. In the corporate sample, women with higher test scores were rated as more domineering, but this did not account for their greater victimization or reduced help.
“One of the central takeaways is that being perceived as intelligent doesn’t necessarily translate into being treated well at work, particularly for women,” Chawla said. “These differences emerge in seemingly ordinary workplace interactions, such as whether colleagues offer task- or emotional-related help, treat them with respect, or instead choose to victimize them.”
“I think the broader takeaway is that recognizing someone’s intelligence is not the same as treating them equitably,” she added. “Organizations need to pay attention not only to how employees are evaluated, but also to how those evaluations shape their everyday interactions with colleagues.”
Chawla stressed that the findings say more about colleagues’ assumptions than about the women themselves. “One important clarification is that our findings should not be interpreted as suggesting that highly intelligent women are inherently less warm, supportive, or collaborative—or that they act in ways that somehow justify the perceptions and treatment of them,” she noted. “In our research, we controlled for this possibility directly and our results hold regardless of these potential perceptions. Rather, our research highlights how gender stereotypes can shape the assumptions colleagues make about women who are perceived as highly intelligent.”
The effects were small, particularly in the student sample, where average hostility ratings and reports of victimization sat near the bottom of their five-point scales. The authors argue that the size of the gender difference still meets common benchmarks for meaningful effects in workplace research, and that small differences in daily treatment can add up over time.
Chawla made a similar point about how these experiences accumulate. “I think it’s important to recognize that the practical significance of these findings extends beyond any single interaction,” she said. “Being excluded from a conversation or not receiving help from a colleague might seem relatively inconsequential in isolation. But when these experiences occur repeatedly, they can shape someone’s sense of belonging, access to resources, and ability to thrive at work.”
“One thing I would emphasize is that conversations about gender inequality at work often focus on highly visible outcomes, such as representation in leadership, pay disparities, or promotion decisions,” she continued. “These are critically important, but they are not the only ways inequality manifests. Our research draws attention to the interpersonal dynamics that unfold in everyday working life.
“Who receives help? Who is included? Who is treated as a valued colleague? These experiences may seem less consequential than formal organizational decisions, but they can meaningfully shape people’s opportunities and experiences at work.”
The study contributes to the scientific understanding of how gender shapes the social consequences of intelligence at work. However, the data are correlational, so the study cannot show that teammates’ perceptions caused the mistreatment, only that the two went together over the following weeks. Teammates were also never told anyone’s test scores, and the researchers did not measure whether colleagues saw these women as especially intelligent.
The samples were moderate in size and came from settings where cognitive ability had already been screened, such as a competitive business school and a company that tests job applicants. The authors note that this narrower range of scores usually makes effects harder to detect, so their results may be conservative.
The researchers also measured victimization and help through self-reported surveys. While peer perceptions were gathered from the teammates themselves, the actual experiences of mistreatment or support were filtered through the perspective of the individual. Future studies could use independent observations to verify how often highly competent women are actually targeted or ignored in group settings.
Finally, these findings do not account for racial or cultural intersections within a single environment. Prior research suggests that stereotypes about competence and warmth differ across racial groups. Future research could explore whether women of different backgrounds experience this competence penalty differently within the same workplace.
“One direction that I think is particularly important is bringing intersectionality to the forefront of this conversation,” Chawla explained. “Although our research examined how the interpersonal consequences of intelligence differ between women and men, we were not able to investigate how these patterns might vary across racial and ethnic groups. This is an important limitation, particularly given existing research suggesting that stereotypes surrounding intelligence, competence, and capability are themselves racialized.”
“Women are not a monolithic group, and the stereotypes that shape how an intelligent woman is perceived may differ substantially depending on her racial or ethnic identity,” she added. “For example, the expectations and assumptions directed toward a highly intelligent Black woman differ from those directed toward a highly intelligent White or Asian woman. I think understanding how gender intersects with race, ethnicity, and other social identities is essential to developing a more complete picture of the observed dynamics.”
The authors also suggest studying whether competent women who are mistreated by teammates still emerge as leaders over time, and whether the same women might be rewarded in promotion decisions while being penalized in daily interactions.
“More broadly, I’d love to see research aimed at understanding how organizations and/or supervisors can disrupt these patterns, particularly by examining the conditions under which intelligence is recognized and valued without producing unintended interpersonal penalties,” Chawla said.
“Ultimately, I hope this research encourages organizations to think more critically about the assumptions employees make about one another, and how even seemingly positive attributes like intelligence can become a source of inequality when viewed through the lens of gender stereotypes,” she added.
The study, “Understanding the Intersection of Gender and Cognitive Ability on Interpersonal Outcomes: A Multistudy Investigation,” was authored by Nitya Chawla, Trevor M. Spoelma, Seo-Hyun Kwon, Allison S. Gabriel, Aleksander P. J. Ellis, and Wen Wu.
URL: https://www.psypost.org/highly-competent-women-face-hidden-social-penalties-in-the-workplace/
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