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by Marianne Cooper on Monday, September 5, 2011 3:00am In September 2008, a picture of a serious looking Michelle Obama appeared on the cover of Radar Magazine above the tag line, Whats So Scary About Michelle Obama? The accompanying article, described as, An Insiders Guide to Americas Next First Lady, provided a list of FAQs and answers like,Why is she so angry? (Shes not angry; she is passionate). According to Columbia Business School professor Katherine Phillips, this cover story highlights a common cultural image of African-American women that they are controlling, demanding, angry, and threatening. Women are not supposed to behave in these kinds of dominant ways, according to cultural norms.
An initial study conducted by Phillips and her colleagues that examined the desirability of certain characteristics among different groups (white women, black women etc.) found that people want white women to be nicer and more communal (agreeable, compassionate, warm) than white men and want white men to be more dominant than white women. In contrast, people do not expect black women to be more communal than black men. Instead, people were more open to black women possessing dominant traits than they were to black men possessing them. From this first study, Phillips concluded that societal stereotypes about how white and black women ought to behave mean that in any given social situation black women can be less nice and more domineering than white women are allowed to be. After determining that black women are given more leeway than white women to be independent and After determining that black women are given more aggressive, Phillips decided to then see how these stereotypes interact with the backlash effect. In a second, follow-up study, Phillips and her colleagues had evaluators rate the likeability and hireability of two equally dominant female job candidates who only differed from each other by race (white vs. black). The results of the study showed a clear backlash effect for the dominant white, female candidate she was less liked and less likely to be hired. The dominant black, female candidate fared much better she was more liked and more likely to be hired.
Katherine Phillips the Paul Calello Professor of Leadership and Ethics at the Columbia Business School. Professor Phillips is an alum of the Stanford Graduate School of Business, and was a visiting faculty member in Organizational Behavior at the Stanford GSB as well as a visiting scholar at the Center for Advanced Studies in Behavioral Sciences at Stanford (CASBS) from 2010-2011. Phillips talk was co-sponsored by the Michelle R. Clayman Institute for Gender Research and the Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity
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