Are women penalized for showing pride at work? Gender disparities in the competence-warmth tradeoff

Showing pride at work clearly communicates personal success (i.e., high competence) and boosts status; yet some evidence suggests it can also signal self-focus and insensitivity to others (i.e., low warmth). Prior scholars have proposed gender differences explain mixed findings, but with limited support. We propose that the benefit-cost tradeoff depends on the displayer's gender in conjunction with the social context of the display. We test the contextualized dual-signaling model of employee pride displays, uniquely assessing how the signaler's gender and receiver's social motives (between-person comparisons) change first-impressions of competence and warmth after one or repeated exposures (i.e., within-person comparisons). Study 1 was a 2 (signaler gender) by 2 (signal context) design obtaining judgments before and after seeing a dynamic pride display. Pride displays increased competence similarly across employee gender, but women saw significantly greater costs to warmth when displays were public (i.e., coworkers present), a violation of gender norms. In Study 2, we replicate this finding regardless of whether coworkers were collaborators or competitors (between-person), and found repeated displays increase the warmth cost for women and the competence gains for men. In Study 3, we compare the costs for women of confirming gender norms for warmth (i.e., happiness display) or violating gender norms for warmth but conforming to leader norms for competence (i.e., pride display). Results suggest “happy” women are preferred as leaders over “proud” women despite higher competence. We clarify mixed findings and confirm the need for contextualized theory to understand gender differences in pride displays and career trajectories.