Elle Beau ❇︎
1 min readJul 13, 2023

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Hmm, it's a complex issue that has a lot of moving parts, but in general, women are punished for seeking authority, and for having too many "masculine" traits even though those are the traits that tend to be most highly valued.

"For, as Heilman and Okimoto point out, there are widespread prescriptions that “specify that women should behave communally, exhibiting nurturing and socially sensitive attributes that demonstrate concern for others, such as being kind, sympathetic, and understanding.”9 Such social norms tend to be far more stringently enforced for women than for their male counterparts, as I have argued throughout this book. The researchers also noted that women don’t have to actively demonstrate uncaring attributes in order to be perceived as uncommunal, and punished accordingly. Such a deficit will often be inferred or assumed, based simply on a woman’s success in a male-coded leadership role.

Heilman and Okimoto write: Several investigations have found that when research participants were told only that female managers had been successful (with no additional behavioral information supplied), they characterized these managers as lacking the prescribed favorable interpersonal qualities related to communality and as instead possessing traits such as selfishness, deceitfulness, deviousness, coldness, and manipulativeness….

It thus appears to take little more than knowledge that a woman is successful at male sex–typed work to instigate interpersonally negative reactions to her."

Manne, Kate. Entitled (p. 164). Crown. Kindle Edition.

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Elle Beau ❇︎
Elle Beau ❇︎

Written by Elle Beau ❇︎

I'm a bitch, I'm a lover, I'm a child, I'm a mother, I'm a sinner, I'm a saint. I do not feel ashamed. I'm your hell, I'm your dream, I'm nothing in between.

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