Women: Want to Be Considered Friendly? Then Keep Your Mouth Shut

Attention women - what we have suspected for years has been proven true. Women who do not say much are viewed as much more likeable than women who speak their opinion. In a recent press release, researchers from Green Mountain College in Poultney, Vermont, detailed their findings.

When looking at relationships and friendships between couples, researchers found that the more verbally assertive a woman was, the less she was liked when other people judged couples.

However, when women kept their opinion to themselves and demonstrated more submissiveness to their mate, those women were deemed to be friendlier.

One might think that in this day and age men might expect a woman to remain quiet, but women would accept assertiveness from other women. Not so, the researchers discovered. Indeed, both the men and the women who were involved in this study rated women who spoke their minds as being unfriendly.

Researchers speculate that if asked if it was O.K. for a woman to speak her mind and be assertive, nearly all of the participants would have said, "yes," yet this study clearly shows that the unconscious role that women are expected to maintain in society has not changed much in the past 50 years.

"In couples in which the woman is more verbally assertive, and the man more submissive, the relationship tends to suffer," "In this study we wanted to test the notion that this phenomenon emerges because gender role expectations lead people to expect men to verbally dominate women. We reasoned because men are expected to be in a position of power over women, couples in which the woman is verbally dominating the man would be rated more harshly than couples that adhere to the traditional role," said Dr. Jennifer Sellers, assistant professor of psychology at Green Mountain College.

About the study
Researchers utilized 95 students as their participants. They were nearly equally divided as to gender, with 50 women and 45 men participating. The students were shown a series of videos that depicted married couples that were having a conflict.

One of the videos portrayed the spouses as being disinterested or verbally assertive, another portrayed the conflict with one spouse being more submissive to the other. Yet another showed a conflict between the person and a faculty member. Even though the individual got very angry, they did not speak their mind to their faculty member. The final video portrayed a couple in a kitchen that became angry, threw down a towel and left the room.

All of the students were clear in their decisions that the women who remained silent were more likeable and friendly than men who remained silent. Women who spoke their minds were unfriendly, as many women who speak their minds can attest.

Source:
http://www.newswise.com/p/articles/view/535636/