Navigating Two Realities: The Gendered Double Bind Between Society and the Workplace

Women are often encouraged to display warmth and tenderness in society, while professional success is associated with stereotypically masculine traits such as assertiveness. This creates a potential double bind in which the desirability of gendered traits differs across social and workplace contexts.

Using a large online experiment with U.S. participants (N = 1,867), we examine how the desirability of masculine and feminine traits for men and women varies across societal and occupational settings. We show that women face a sharp shift: feminine traits are highly desirable in society but substantially less at work, particularly in male-dominated industries, alongside a significant increase in the desirability of masculine traits for women even in female-dominated contexts compared to society at large. In contrast, desirability for men’s masculinity remain largely stable, while feminine traits are less desirable outside female-dominated occupations.

We further extend the identity-based framework of Akerlof and Kranton (2000) to interpret these context-dependent trade-offs and their implications for workplace behavior.

Coauthor: Stefano Piasenti

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