There’s a career tax on being smart at work—but only if you’re a woman
Sara Winslow had been working in sales for almost 20 years when things started to get uncomfortable.
It was 2020. She was in her early forties, and by any conventional measure, she was thriving. She had just won an internal company award for bringing in the biggest sales account the previous year. But not everyone was celebrating her success.
In meetings, she says, some of her male colleagues would challenge and undermine her. Tensions came to a head in July 2020, when, after a particularly bitter dispute, one of those men sent her a series of emails she describes as “disparaging.” In one, he referred to her as a “savant.” It came across as “sarcastic, antagonistic, and mocking,” she says.
The next year, the man who wrote that email was promoted to become her manager. He subsequently assigned her the smallest sales territory in the country. Winslow, who is based in Los Angeles, believed she was being punished for speaking up.
“The sales organization had become a boys’ club,” she says. “And in my experience, it wasn’t simply a culture that excluded women. It was one that seemed particularly uncomfortable with intelligent, competent women.”
Winslow’s experience potentially points to a tension that researchers have been investigating for years: Men may admire intelligent women in principle, yet respond very differently when confronted with their intelligence in person.
In one study, published in 2015, men expressed greater romantic interest in women who outperformed them on intelligence tests when considering them hypothetically. But when they believed a woman had outperformed them in a face-to-face setting, their romantic interest diminished.
Now, new research published in the Journal of Applied Psychology suggests that this discomfort may extend beyond dating and into the workplace, where the consequences can be far-reaching.
In a study involving 826 people across 140 teams, researchers found that women with higher cognitive ability were more likely to be perceived by colleagues as hostile and, in one of the two studies, as less warm and considerate.
Those perceptions were associated with greater mistreatment and less help from coworkers. For men, higher cognitive ability did not carry the same interpersonal penalty.
The findings may expose a troubling contradiction at the heart of modern working life. Girls are encouraged to excel; women are urged to develop their talents; and employers insist that intelligence and ability are the foundations of professional success. But the qualities that should help women get ahead may also make them targets of suspicion, hostility, and exclusion.
And in workplaces in which careers depend not just on what people achieve but on the support, trust, and opportunities they receive from others, that raises an important question: How meritocratic can an organization really be if the people it most values on paper are, in practice, penalized for their abilities?
The Intelligence Double BindTo understand why intelligence might be interpreted so differently in men and women, it helps to look at the stubborn gender stereotypes that continue to shape professional life.
Vanessa Bohns, a professor of organizational behavior at Cornell University, says the findings from the latest study are consistent with a substantial body of research showing that women can be penalized for behaving in ways that defy traditional expectations.
“Women,” she says, “tend to be stereotyped as communal and compliant. That is why previous research has found that when they behave in ways that are clearly opposed to those stereotypes—such as by behaving in self-assured, assertive ways—they are viewed more negatively.”
But the new findings raise the possibility that women may not even have to be overtly assertive to encounter this backlash. Higher cognitive ability alone was associated with less favorable perceptions of women, suggesting that the penalties for defying gender expectations may be more pervasive than previously understood.
“Women don’t have to behave in an explicitly self-assured or assertive way. They just have to possess traits like intelligence and competence—traits that merely imply they may be agentic and self-assured—to face a penalty,” Bohns says. “In this way, these findings suggest the tightrope women walk at work may be even trickier to navigate than was previously thought.”
For Amy Diehl, a researcher who studies gender bias in organizations and cowrote Glass Walls: Shattering the Six Gender Bias Barriers Still Holding Women Back at Work, the findings illustrate an even broader problem: the tendency for women to be judged against standards they can never quite satisfy.
“Practically any characteristic can be declared problematic for a specific woman in a specific situation,” she says. “The surface-level critique is a red herring for underlying gender bias.”
Diehl and a fellow researcher, Leanne Dzubinski, have documented examples of women criticized for being too intelligent and others criticized for not being intelligent enough.
“It is another double bind women are forced to navigate; there is no winning,” Diehl says.
‘Who’s Being Excluded?’What makes this double bind particularly pernicious is how easily its consequences can be overlooked.
Workplace inequality doesn’t always manifest in an unfair promotion decision or a discriminatory performance review. Sometimes, it takes the form of a colleague who is less willing to lend a hand, share information, or offer support.
For Nitya Chawla, an associate professor at the UCL School of Management who led the new research about perceptions of intelligent women, that distinction is crucial. Her team set out to understand whether the advantages intelligence can confer on women in leadership evaluations also extend to their everyday relationships with colleagues. They concluded that that wasn’t necessarily the case.
“There’s a difference between whether someone is seen as a potentially really great leader versus someone your colleagues actually want to work with, and want to support and want to see you thrive,” she says.
While her study did not track promotions, salaries, or long-term career outcomes, its findings suggest that organizations could be overlooking an important source of disadvantage: the informal interactions that shape people’s ability to succeed at work.
So what’s to be done?
For Chawla, the answer is—emphatically—not that women should make themselves less conspicuously intelligent or more accommodating. “I really want to make sure that our research is not suggesting that women need to downplay their intelligence or that they should change who they are or how they behave,” she says.
Instead, she argues, the responsibility lies with employers. For decades, efforts to address workplace inequality have focused heavily on structural barriers, including hiring practices, promotion decisions, and performance evaluations. Those reforms remain essential, but they cannot capture everything that happens between colleagues.
“What our research is suggesting is that we also need to be paying attention to what’s happening between colleagues,” Chawla says. “So who’s being offered help? Who’s being excluded? Are people undermining a certain individual or colleague?”
That could mean more regular conversations about how employees experience their working relationships, as well as greater scrutiny of the assumptions that inform colleagues’ assessments of one another. Even widely used tools such as 360-degree reviews, Chawla notes, can reflect the stereotypes of the people providing the feedback. Gathering more opinions does not necessarily eliminate bias if those opinions are shaped by similar expectations.
Her study did not test specific solutions. But Chawla believes employers need to look beyond whether their formal systems are fair and ask whether their everyday cultures live up to the same ideals.
“Task performance aside,” she says, “how are we treating this individual?”
It’s one thing to recognize intelligence and reward achievement, she says. It’s another to create an environment in which the people who possess those qualities are actually allowed to thrive.