Study suggests why Hillary should keep her cool

NEW YORK: Whether you are running for the president's post or looking for a clerical job, you cannot afford to get angry if you are a woman, warns a set of studies.

People accept and even reward men who get angry, but view women who lose their temper as less competent, is a conclusion of one of the studies.

Observations suggest that women pay a clear price for showing anger and men don't.

Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign has put a spotlight on the question of whether anger hurts a female candidate. The answer appears to be an unequivocal yes - unless the anger deals with treatment of a family member.

"An angry woman loses status, no matter what her position," said Victoria Brescoll of Yale University, who worked in Clinton's office as a Congressional Fellow in 2004 preparing her doctoral thesis on gender bias.

Brescoll and Eric Uhlmann of Northwestern University recently completed three separate studies to explore a phenomenon that may be all-too-familiar to women like New York Senator Clinton.

These studies provide women with recommendations for navigating emotional hazards of the workplace. Brescoll said it pays to stay emotionally neutral and, if you can't, at least explain what ticked you off in the first place.

Findings of these studies have been published in the latest issue of the journal Psychological Science.

In all studies, both men and women were shown videos of actors portraying men and women who were ostensibly applying for a job.

The participants in the studies were then asked to rate applicants on how much responsibility they should be given, their perceived competence, whether they should be hired, and how much they should get paid.

Both men and women reached the same conclusion: Angry men deserved more status, a higher salary, and were expected to be better at the job than angry women.

Brescoll and her colleague then compared angry job applicants to ones who did not display any emotion. And this time the researchers showed study participants videos of both men and women applying for lower-status jobs.

The findings were duplicated: Angry men were valued more highly than angry women no matter what level they were applying for. However, the disparities disappeared when men and women who were emotionally neutral were ranked.