Looking to Get Ahead? How Much You Talk May Affect Promotion
Published at | Updated at(NEW HAVEN, Conn.) — Men determined to get ahead in the business world should learn to speak up, a Yale School of Management study finds.
On the other hand, the Yale researchers recommend that women in the workplace should hush up if they’re trying to climb the corporate ladder.
As chauvinistic as it sounds, the study concluded that female employees who tend to gab are viewed as “domineering and presumptuous,” and if they really want to succeed, they need to talk less, especially around their male peers.
Male workers don’t have to hold their tongue, the Yale study reveals; in fact, the more they verbalize their opinions, the more competent they appear to be.
In one experiment, participants were asked to rate a fictional chief executive in the following four categories: a talkative man, quiet man, talkative woman or quiet woman. Talkative men were ranked higher in the competency scale than their quiet counterparts while the opposite was true of women chief executives.
Lead researcher Victoria Brescoll said, “When men talk a lot and they have power, people want to reward them either by hiring them, voting for them, or just giving them more power and responsibility at work.”
However, women will temper how much they talk, according to Brescoll, because they don’t want to seem like they’re coming on too strong.
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