Leadership

Men Waste Brain Power Trying to Be Manly, Study Says

By Jessica Stillman

Updated on: November 2, 2010 / 8:25 AM EDT / MoneyWatch

I've blogged plenty of times about how women are affected by gender biases at work, but it's rare to see a study that looks at how our ideas of masculinity impact men. Recent research has filled this gap, however, finding that it's not just the ladies who are impacted by gender stereotypes. Guys, apparently you're wasting brain power trying to ensure that you appear manly.

The first of a series of four studies carried out by professor David Gal and PhD student James Wilkie at the Kellogg School and reported recently in Kellogg Insight used the truism that real men don't eat quiche as a basis to investigate the impact of gender anxiety on men's thinking. When rushed to choose from a list of girly and manly menu items, men chose randomly just like women. But when they were given time to ponder, they switched from the likes of very berry cheesecake to good old porterhouse, proving that "when people have time or can concentrate on things, they tend to incorporate norms or expectations into their decisions," according to Wilkie.

When similar experiments were tried asking guys to choose between rounded, girly home furnishings and angled, severe manly ones, the same held true. Distraction or time pressure caused men to give up on picking masculine items and choose more randomly.

So what's the lesson here besides that you should avoid choosing doorknobs or deserts while distracted? The researchers say that if distraction keeps us from making gendered choices, the reverse is also true -- making gendered choices distracts us.

The effort required to make gendered choices degrades men's performances on other cognitively demanding tasks. For example, in their third experiment, Wilkie and Gal had men and women choose from lists that included either only objects associated with their gender or a mix of masculine and feminine objects. Men, but not women, forced to choose between objects of both genders subsequently performed worse on a test of their abilities--an anagram task.

For marketers the takeaway is obvious. If you want to appeal to men, don't threaten their masculinity, even if doing so might seem likely to alienate female customers. "Products or brands that are targeted to both men and women might want to err on the side of adopting a masculine rather than feminine positioning, since men are more likely to be influenced by product and brand gender associations," concludes Gal.

And what does the research mean for you average everyday guy at work? The academics suggest your stress about coming off as sufficiently manly is probably draining your brain power more than you think. Do you believe them?

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(Photo courtesy of Flickr user diekatrin, CC 2.0)