Men are not comfortable with ambitious women

Social relationships are so complex and complicated that it is not surprising that they are the focus of many studies. In this case, I would like to comment on a couple of recent works that focus on one of the psychological factors that come into play in the relationship between a man and a woman.

Apparently, men feel uncomfortable when they are with more ambitious and "successful" women (work or social) than them.

The romantic penalty

The "romantic penalty" that ambitious women suffer is not a new topic. There are quite a few studies related to it, although these two new works reinforce this concept.

The first, made in the United States, shows how single women reduce their ambitions in public, while the second, carried out in Sweden, reveals a real consequence of ambitions in marriages: the increase in divorces.

Single women hide their ambitions

The study conducted by Leonardo Bursztyn, Thomas Fujiwara and Amanda Pallais, three American economists, first consisted in offering a questionnaire to be filled in by a group of new students for a Master's Degree in Business Administration (MBA), as part of their initiation in the.

The questionnaire contained questions about job preferences and personality traits that one must have to run a business. But there were two types of questionnaire that only differed in the use of a single sentence: in some cases it was indicated that the results were completely anonymous; and in others that the answers were to be made public and that the name had to be indicated.

Hiding ambition

The results were not delayed. When looking at the private responses between single, engaged women and men, there were no significant differences. But things were not the same in public.

While women with a partner and men maintained the same response as the previous ones, in single women it appeared a totally different pattern of responses and always below the scale of ambition. In the question about the desired salary to receive, for example, the amount was reduced to $ 18,000 per year less than the answer in private. Willingness to travel was also affected (7 days less per month); And the same happened with the desired weekly working hours: 4 hours less a week.

Thus, in the responses of single women that were revealed to the rest of the class there was a reduction in expressed professional and leadership ambitions. The authors concluded that these women do not want to appear ambitious due to the “bad image” that this produces in the search for a partner. As one of its authors indicates: “single women avoid actions that could help them in their careers when they have negative consequences in the“ marriage market ””.

The success of women associated with divorce

The Second job It was performed by the couple Olle Folke and Johanna Rickne, in Sweden. This study shows how career progression in women negatively affects their marriage, as opposed to a man.

This research was possible thanks to the fact that the Swedish government presents an extensive registry of information on its inhabitants (to the delight of sociologists). In fact, they focused on a sector where the ambitions are very clear: in marriage couples of aspiring parliamentarians.

There is a high divorce rate among politicians in this country. The number of these before an election is similar between future "losers" and "winners", but changes dramatically after them, with an increase of almost double among winners. But This looks more accentuated if I know who wins is a woman.

There are several relevant factors in this phenomenon, such as age differences, but in a general way, it can be seen that when women obtain a promotion with salary increase (in this case, also associated with a position of political power), the divorce rate is significantly higher than if it were the man who had obtained the Market Stall. This has also been seen in promotions within private companiesAlthough it is sometimes difficult to discern when a promotion in a company is positive or negative, it does not always lead to better conditions.

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New life... in every way

The conclusion reached by the authors is that when the woman has a sudden job success puts your marriage at risk if the man has always been the dominant force in the income of the home. To reaffirm this, they emphasized that a greater number of divorces are seen in cases where the wife becomes the main income force in the household over the husband.

Of course, these results cannot be happily extrapolated to countries other than Sweden either, as culture and traditions are different in each country. Yet the question remains to what extent female gender roles are likely to be less constricting elsewhere than in Sweden.

• Related article: "Women are undervalued at work (and it seems normal to us)"