Agentic but not warm: Age-gender interactions and the consequences of stereotype incongruity perceptions for middle-aged professional women

Abstract

We propose that perceptions of professional women change differently than perceptions of men as they age. Drawing inspiration from intersectionality theory, we examine the interaction of age and gender, finding that professional women are seen as more agentic, but also maximally incongruent with the gender-intensified prescription of being communal, in middle age. Our experiment showed that middle-aged women were perceived as agentic, like men, but also as declining more in warmth between young adulthood and middle age. Our field study also showed that middle-aged professional women are viewed as similarly agentic but less warm than men. Our longitudinal within-person study showed that these perceptions have consequences: Unlike men, middle-aged women (professors) received lower performance evaluations compared to their younger selves. Further, a linguistic analysis showed that middle-aged women professors were acknowledged to be more agentic, but also criticized for violating communal stereotype prescriptions, which mediated the link between age and women’s, but not men’s, performance evaluations.