Humour is a funny business for women leaders
Women in leadership roles often get penalised when they're seen as acting too aggressively at work. And according to a new study, being humorous isn’t a great idea either: female leaders apparently get pinged for being too funny on the job, too.
In a forthcoming paper in the Journal of Applied Psychology, researchers at the University of Arizona and University of Colorado Boulder tested how humour is viewed when it comes from male versus female leaders giving a presentation.
When a woman used humour, the study found, participants were more likely to view it as “disruptive” or distracting, while jokes cracked by male presenters were more likely to be seen as “functional” or helpful.
Context is key here, however. The researchers designed an experimental study where participants each watched one of four videos of a hypothetical retail manager making a store sales presentation. In two of the videos, the male and female “leaders” used a script without any humour; in the other two, they used workplace-appropriate jokes, such as cracks about drones delivering packages.
The humorous men were described as having higher status than the men who played it straight, while the inverse happened with the women. The jokes were more likely to be viewed as making the women seem less capable as leaders.
Because humour can be interpreted as a good or bad thing on the job — helping to defuse tension, say, or distracting from the real job at hand — the gender of the person affects how the jokes are viewed, says Jon Evans, one of the researchers.
It's not the first time research has examined the complex relationship between gender and humour. One professor looked at some 14 million student reviews of professors and found women were less likely to be described as “funny” in almost every field.
Joanne Gilbert, a professor at Alma College in Michigan who studies humour, communication and performance, says the outcome of Evans' study, “doesn't surprise me at all”.
But she doesn't think women should see the study as a message not to use humour in leadership positions. “If she's in a board meeting of all male colleagues and she can make people laugh, I would absolutely encourage her to do it.”
Other research has shown that humour can be helpful to women professionally. Stephanie Schnurr, who studies linguistics and leadership at the University of Warwick, has studied real-life teams where humour successfully helped women overcome differences with their male colleagues or lighten the firm positions or controversial decisions they must make as leaders.
One thing that distinguishes her research from Evans' study, she says, is that she studied actual teams, with people who knew each other and would be able to put a female leader's humour into context.
Indeed, researcher Evans is careful to note that caveat, saying people who worked closely with a leader would have more experience to draw on.
But in a setting where you're unknown to your audience — a sales presentation at a trade show, a cold call to a new client, even a job interview — women may want to roll out the laugh lines more cautiously than men.
“The advice from many popular authors and books is that adding humour to your presentation makes you more charismatic,” Evans says. “That can be misguided for women.”