She Can’t Say That … or Can She? Perceptions of Men’s and Women’s Humor Use in the Workplace

Abstract

Humor is associated with numerous positive outcomes in the workplace (e.g., building cohesiveness, stress reduction), and can be a useful tool for leaders (e.g., softening criticism). Although normative expectations for men’s and women’s behavior might allow both men and women to use communal forms of humor (i.e., affiliative humor), we hypothesized that gender role expectations would cause people to negatively evaluate women who use more agentic forms of humor (i.e., aggressive humor). Moreover, we predicted that this pattern would be more pronounced for women in low-status positions. We tested our hypotheses using two scenario-based studies; our first study included 96 MBA student participants who responded to two hypothetical scenarios, and a second follow up study included 228 undergraduate participants who responded to a third hypothetical scenario. Results from our two studies suggested that participants perceived women humorists more negatively when they used aggressive humor relative to affiliative humor, whereas no such difference was observed when the humorists were men. We also found that high occupational status counteracted this bias, but only when the target of the humor was a woman. In other words, women are at a disadvantage in their use of humor in general (i.e., negative perceptions of women who use aggressive humor), and even in workplace contexts where they have high status (i.e., status only protects them against negative perceptions when they use aggressive humor with female targets).