High test scores help men at work but bring hostility for women, studies find

Two studies published in the Journal of Applied Psychology found that women who scored higher on cognitive ability tests were perceived by their teammates as more hostile, reported more mistreatment, and received less help from colleagues. Men with similarly high scores did not show the pattern. In one of the samples, high-scoring men reported better treatment from peers than other men did.

The samples were 432 students and 394 office workers. The research is framed by social role theory, which holds that women are traditionally expected to display communal traits — helpful, kind, attentive to others — while men are expected to display agentic traits such as decisiveness, independence, and competitiveness. When people violate those unwritten expectations, the theory goes, they face social disapproval.

It appeared in the informal currency of teamwork: who gets labeled hostile, who gets help, who gets mistreated.

The findings do not prove that intelligence causes mistreatment. The coverage does not date the study or specify when data collection occurred, and the published paper itself was not available to verify the sample sizes independently.

What the evidence does support is a narrower, more useful conclusion: the same trait can carry different social consequences depending on who holds it. If high-ability women are penalized in peer interactions while high-ability men are rewarded, then hiring and promotion fixes alone will not solve a problem that lives in team dynamics. The cost is invisible to the systems most organizations use to measure talent — which is precisely why it persists.