In 2003, Frank Flynn taught a Harvard Business School case study on Silicon Valley entrepreneur Heidi Roizin to a class at Columbia. Her story is epic: After graduating from Stanford's Graduate School of Business in 1983, she founded an early Silicon Valley software company before becoming president of Software Publishers' Association and later serving as Vice President of World Wide Developer Relations for Apple. Then she became a venture capitalist and Stanford lecturer.
But when those Columbia students read her story, only half of them knew her as Heidi Roizin. The other half read the same story with a changed name: Heidi became Howard.
The students reacted very differently to the same protagonist, depending on the perceived gender.
"Although [students] think [Heidi is] just as competent and effective as Howard, they don't like her, they wouldn't hire her, and they wouldn't want to work with her," Flynn later said. "As gender researchers would predict, this seems to be driven by how much they disliked Heidi's aggressive personality. The more assertive they thought Heidi was, the more harshly they judged her (but the same was not true for those who rated Howard)."
In short, men are liked for being assertive, while women are disliked.
Here's one example:
http://mobile.businessinsider.com/psychology-biases-that-ben...
In 2003, Frank Flynn taught a Harvard Business School case study on Silicon Valley entrepreneur Heidi Roizin to a class at Columbia. Her story is epic: After graduating from Stanford's Graduate School of Business in 1983, she founded an early Silicon Valley software company before becoming president of Software Publishers' Association and later serving as Vice President of World Wide Developer Relations for Apple. Then she became a venture capitalist and Stanford lecturer.
But when those Columbia students read her story, only half of them knew her as Heidi Roizin. The other half read the same story with a changed name: Heidi became Howard.
The students reacted very differently to the same protagonist, depending on the perceived gender.
"Although [students] think [Heidi is] just as competent and effective as Howard, they don't like her, they wouldn't hire her, and they wouldn't want to work with her," Flynn later said. "As gender researchers would predict, this seems to be driven by how much they disliked Heidi's aggressive personality. The more assertive they thought Heidi was, the more harshly they judged her (but the same was not true for those who rated Howard)."
In short, men are liked for being assertive, while women are disliked.