How Gender Stereotypes Affect

If a colleague offers help, it’s a good thing. Help is help, after all, isn’t it?

Not exactly, says Seoin Yoon, an assistant professor of management and entrepreneurship who, along with research colleagues, wanted to know why some people feel less positive—and specifically, less competent—when they receive help at work.

The team conducted an experience-sampling study to better understand when receiving help, a mundane and foundational aspect of organizational life, may not be beneficial, and for whom. The study captured the “lived-through” everyday experience of employees for three weeks.

Whether help is helpful depends on the type of assistance provided and who receives it. Yoon and her team focused on empowering and non-empowering help for their research. Empowering help involves the recipient’s interaction and active participation. “Consider a co-worker who sits down with you to guide you through the task and ensure you can independently execute the solution,” explains Yoon.

Conversely, with non-empowering help, the recipient is not an active participant and is only an observer. “Picture the coworker solving the problem for you without giving instructions, saying, ‘Let me handle this; just look over my shoulder while I do it.’ ”

The research reveals that while men benefit from receiving help in any form, women lose their sense of competence when receiving non-empowering help. The short answer to why this is the case: gender stereotypes.

“When receiving help as a passive participant, women activate gender stereotypes almost immediately,” says Yoon. “They know that society views them in a certain way—as less capable, dependent on others for help, and less committed to work. Because of this, women question their competence when being helped without being empowered.”

Conversely, men don’t contend with stereotypes that activate any sense of worry when someone else is helping them; instead, they experience a competence boost.

“When businesswomen are presented with non-empowering help, it takes away their opportunity to assert themselves,” says Yoon, “further eroding confidence. And that has consequences.”

In fact, Yoon’s studies showed that eroded competence creates a self-fulfilling prophecy. “Our beliefs and perceptions about ourselves dictate how we behave in the workplace,” says Yoon. As a result of their lower perceived competence, women are less likely to make progress at work, offer help to others, and be around co-workers, which may ultimately disadvantage them at work.

“Companies need to know that ‘just fixing a problem for a coworker’ is not ideal,” says Yoon. However, her research revealed that empowering help can bolster women’s sense of competence.

“Organizations should encourage empowering help and train staff to implement it,” she says. It’s also important to afford employees the time to provide such help and consider putting support systems in place to prevent stereotypes from perpetuating. All of these actions can benefit all employees, not just a select few.

Gender is only one topic Yoon and her colleagues studied in their paper, “When, Why, and for Whom Is Receiving Help Actually Helpful? Differential Effects of Receiving Empowering and Nonempowering Help Based on Recipient Gender,” published in the Journal of Applied Psychology. “We could perhaps extend the same logic to include minority groups and people with disability status,” says Yoon. “The onus is on organizations to dispel negative stereotypes about these individuals.”

Such insights, she says, could be a solution to the “pipeline problem” faced by underrepresented minorities.