How the Warmth vs. Competence Gender Dichotomy Shaped the Fani Willis Misconduct Hearing
Listen to Chitra’s interview with Ron Roberts on The Ron Show. Last week, I wrote a piece published in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution headlined, “As Fani Willis shows, dominant, ambitious women leaders pay price.” In it, I argued that it is true that Willis, the District Attorney from Fulton County, Georgia, likely committed a significant ethical mistake in hiring Nathan Wade as special prosecutor in the Trump case, despite their romantic entanglement. It also is likely true that Willis was targeted as a prominent and aggressive Black female prosecutor attempting to bring to justice one of the most powerful and seemingly untouchable men in the world, election-denying former President Donald J. Trump and his merry band of cronies and enablers from the Republican Party. I wrote the piece in light of the evidentiary hearing held on Feb. 15 by Fulton County Superior Court Judge Scott McAfee. At issue was whether to remove Willis from the Trump election interference case she was prosecuting because of the allegations of misconduct filed by one of Trump’s co-defendants. Willis testified angrily and combatively for two hours, defending her reputation, describing the allegations as “lies, lies, lies,” and reminding the court that it was Trump and not she who was under trial. Willis has argued that the allegations are another smokescreen to hide the former president’s criminal conduct. The criminal case is one of four Trump is confronting and one of the most sprawling and complex, with a novel legal theory that he and 18 co-defendants took part in a sweeping criminal enterprise to subvert the outcome of the 2020 presidential elections and stay in power, despite losing the elections to President Joe Biden. My opinion piece got a lot of responses on social media. Ron Roberts, host of “The Ron Show,” (link at the end of this post) also invited me on his podcast on Atlanta’s progressive audio platform on AmericaOne Radio, to explore the question of whether there truly is a double standard in the workplace that judges women differently than men. The answer is an unequivocal “yes!” As I said in my opinion piece, the hearing came on the heels of a new research study by researchers at the University of Michigan and Carnegie Mellon that shows that while men benefit from networking with high-status people, women lose status in the eyes of their colleagues and damage their careers. Why? The study’s authors wrote, “People typically don’t like dominant and ambitious female leaders.” Willis can certainly attest to that. The authors also point to sobering but unsurprising statistics that women “continue to be underrepresented in the highest echelons of business and government.” I spoke about the study’s conclusion last week at a long overdue lunch with a friend, Christopher Graves, former global chairman of Ogilvy Public Relations and now, founder of The Resonance Code. Graves is one of the preeminent behavioral science researchers in the world. He has created a unique way to decode the human hard-wiring that prevents critical messaging (for example, vaccine adoption, climate change, or gun control) from reaching target audiences, whether through ads or public health messaging. Over lunch, Graves introduced me to some essential behavioral science research and concepts, which I’d like to share with you, foremost by the legendary Susan Fiske, a professor of psychology at Princeton University who has spent decades doing landmark research studying how “stereotyping, prejudice, and discrimination are encouraged or discouraged by social relationships, such as cooperation, competition, and power.” Central to Fiske’s research is her work on how “two crucial dimensions of social cognition,” warmth and competence, affect men and women differently in life, work and society. “Susan Fiske’s research reveals that we assess others across two axes: warmth and competence. Warmth is accessibility and likeability,” Graves said. “From an evolutionary stance, warmth takes primacy over competence because before we stick around to find out how competent you are, we need to know if you are an enemy or a friend.” To put it simply, for the caveman bent on survival, warmth and competence determined whether human A was likely to kill human B and whether A had the competence to do so. In dozens of studies, Fiske and many of her behavioral science colleagues and compatriots have determined that that hardwired dichotomy continues to manifest every day in society and the workforce in how men and women are perceived, hired, promoted, rewarded, and positioned for influence. “Warmth alone isn’t enough. It is the hapless bungler. Competence without warmth, at its extreme, is the evil scientist or Bond villain,” says Graves. “So the big win is scoring highly on warmth and competence. But there is a gender divide on how this works which comes to the detriment of competent women leaders and professionals.” Fiske and others have uncovered that a man who is perceived to be competent can also be perceived as warm despite no evidence to that effect. But, when a woman is perceived to be competent, “warmth and competence become a zero-sum game,” says Graves. “That is, a woman perceived to be competent is unfairly also seen as incapable of being warm. So she will be labeled “bossy” or “hard-edged” or a “b–ch.” In her blog, Musings on Media, Tech and Leadership, digital advertising expert Cecile Blanc wrote an article in 2020, titled, “The warmth/competence matrix for women, from the West Wing to the workplace.” Blanc notes how this matrix is pervasive including in pop culture. Blanc noted that some of the central West Wing male characters, for instance, “exhibit borderline antisocial behaviours, but all are leadership material. Their lack of warmth can be compensated by competence.” For the female characters, however, she says “a lack of warmth cannot be compensated by more competence or the other way around.” They are portrayed as cold, incompetent, or powerless. In their 2009 research paper, “Warmth, competence, and ambivalent sexism: Vertical assault and collateral damage.” Harvard psychology professor Mina Cikara and Fiske opened with examples of how presidential candidate Hillary Clinton was skewered
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