Instances of incivility within the legal profession are well-documented. Women—particularly young women—are often the targets of such incivility. And the people who engage in that type of conduct are often men.

While I’ve written about incivility before in the context of relationships with opposing counsel, incivility within our own workplaces can have even more profound effects on our well-being and standing among our peers. If you work in a place where your ideas are met with derision and rudeness, you’ll likely eventually stop sharing those thoughts. Alternatively, working in such an environment can cause you to express your ideas with the same tone and, as studies have regularly shown, although doing so doesn’t hurt men, women are penalized when they express their thoughts with contempt, disgust, or sarcasm. As a result, women who work in environments that lack civility can find themselves between and rock and hard place. Whether they keep silent or speak out, they can receive negative performance reviews, be denied advancement opportunities, suffer financial consequences, and be shut out of high visibility work. And, when women have these experiences, the gap between men and women in the workplace widens.

In this week’s Comes Now, we explore a new study that explores the extent to which incivility at work silences women more than men.

The Study

Kristin Bain, Kathryn Coll, Tamar A. Kreps, and Elizabeth R. Tenney recently published an article in the Journal of Business Ethics describing two related studies on the effects of incivility in the workplace. They define incivility as “behavior that violates norms of mutual respect but does not clearly intend to harm.” Thus, unlike harassment or assault, incivility is “mundane, rude behavior.”

In the first study, the researchers asked 750 participants to do a 15-minute brainstorming activity with three other group members they named Mike, Lisa, and TS. After the participants spent several minutes chatting with this group, the researchers asked the participants to consider what it would be like to work with the same group in the future, and whether they would choose to share their ideas or keep them to themselves.

As you can see from the image below, the differences between the “civil” and “uncivil” discussions were not vast:

Despite the relatively small differences between the nature of the two discussions, participants who had been in the more uncivil groups said they were more likely in the future to withhold contributions from that group than those who had been in more civil groups. However, the effect of incivility on men and women participants wasn’t the same.

Although the researchers found no gender differences in silence among participants in civil groups, among those in uncivil groups, women said they would choose silence more than men. (Because the study had such a small number of nonbinary participants, the researchers elected not to include nonbinary people in their analyses.)

The researchers then sought to understand why women were more likely than men to believe they would be socially punished for behavior deemed “inappropriate” for their gender. They measured the participants’ senses of psychological safety, an assessment of the potential for negative consequences when taking risks in a group. But it wasn’t a sense of psychological safety that determined whether participants remained silent at work. Instead, the researchers found that anticipated gender backlash was an even more powerful predictor of gender differences in silence. This finding further supported their conclusion that women in uncivil groups withheld contributions due to the belief that they would face negative consequences because of their gender, not general concerns about taking risks.

The researchers then wanted to test these ideas in real workplaces. They recruited 2,554 people working in industries such as education, healthcare, and finance who worked from home (20%), on-site (45%) and in hybrid environments (35%). They then asked the participants about the people they interacted most at work.

In one online survey, participants reported how uncivil their workgroup was and how much gender backlash they anticipated for speaking up with challenging ideas. Two weeks later, the researchers then asked the survey participants how often they withhold their ideas from their workgroup. They found the same patterns as they had in their first study between incivility, anticipated backlash, and silence.

The researchers found these conclusions to be significant for a few reasons. While they acknowledged that it was not surprising that both men and women were less likely to speak up in an uncivil group, they found it significant that women look for “cues” about whether a particular group is safe for sharing ideas and will be silent when those cues suggest that the environment is an uncivil one.

They further noted that while managers often think that they need to promote women’s voices to increase their confidence in speaking in the workplace, this approach may not work in environments where incivility is regularly present. As we so often say in this newsletter, the solution is not in “improving” women, it’s in improving our workplaces.

Concluding Thoughts

I don’t think anyone will be surprised to learn that incivility within our workplaces stifles positive discussions, discourages risk-taking, and can destroy feelings of belonging. But the secondary conclusion of these studies—that incivility silences women more than men, and silences women because they fear gender-related backlash—is an important addition.

It’s important to have studies that show that women don’t get quiet in uncivil environments because we can’t take it. It’s because we’re smart. We can see when the cards are stacked against us and we don’t waste our breath on those who won’t listen just because we’re women. If our employers want to hear from us (and let’s face it, many don’t) they need to create spaces where we can speak without being dismissed or attacked.

While it’s unlikely that workplaces where incivility pervades virtually every conversation will heed the warnings of these studies, hopefully workplaces where these types of conversations have begun to creep will do so. This group of studies shows that, if employers who otherwise care discover that women don’t contribute as much as they’d like, they must look somewhere other than the quiet women to learn why that’s happening.

A Heads-Up to Subscribers

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While there could be many reasons for this, ultimately I’m becoming less and less comfortable reaching my audience via any form of social media. I don’t have control over the algorithms and there simply isn’t a platform where the owner(s) truly care about women lawyers or issues of gender equity more generally.

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