Arghavan Salles

Opinion contributor

I am an angry woman. And I am not alone.

For me, the current cycle of anger started with the women’s U.S. Open final last month. Instead of getting to marvel at the prowess and majesty on display, millions of us witnessed sexism on one of the world’s largest stages when Serena Williams was penalized for speaking tersely to the chair umpire.

The next collective insult was Justice Brett Kavanaugh's confirmation hearings, which reminded women that whether we are loud or soft-spoken or angry or sad, we are sometimes barely visible.

As an engineering student at the University of Southern California, and later a medical student at Stanford University, I was blissfully unaware of gender dynamics. It was only when I started my surgical residency that my belief in meritocracy dissolved. Struck by the marked sexism I witnessed, I took a break from my surgical residency to pursue a Ph.D. exploring the stereotype that men are better surgeons than women and how that impacts women training to become surgeons.

Now as a practicing surgeon, I continuously navigate the world of gender bias both personally and professionally.

Women are punished for their anger

Like most women, I do not typically have the courage to do what Williams did when she saw through the superficial decorum of the chair umpire and called it out: “Because I am a woman you are going to take this away from me?” Nor do I typically have the courage to make myself the face of women's experiences, as Christine Blasey Ford did during the confirmation hearings.

For those of us who are not quite so bold as Williams and Ford, our anger smolders while we bite our tongues. It morphs into sadness because we cannot defend ourselves for fear of being seen as uncouth. And we cannot point out the bias around us lest we be thought of as whiny. What are we to do, then, when faced with such injustice? Perhaps some data can help us understand.

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People do not like it when women are angry. Students shown a woman acting as a business leader with varying emotions rated her as less effective when she expressed anger than when she expressed no emotion. This is partially because angry women violate prevalent gender schemas which require women to be kind and nurturing.

Similarly, when researchers show people videos of a man or a woman being angry, people confer the man higher status and interpret his anger as being situational. Yet they confer the woman lower status and say she is just an angry person. In other words, they justify the man’s anger due to external forces while they make an internal attribution for the woman’s anger. And women who are assertive and angry are also believed to be less competent and less hirable.

Women face a maze of double standards

Another keystone of bias is the differential application of rules. Rules are not enforced for men and women universally due to shifting standards; in the case of the U.S. Open, there are countless examples of chair umpires tolerating men behaving unprofessionally on the court. In other words, what is acceptable from a woman may not be the same as what is acceptable from a man.

Similarly, when people are asked to choose between male and female job applicants for a traditionally masculine job, people say they value whichever qualities the male applicant possesses. Standards shift to accommodate biases.

Like many women, I have observed sexism and discrimination firsthand. Double standards abound. Ask any woman physician about her interactions with nurses, and she will have a story about how we, unlike our male colleagues, have to build social capital in order to develop a professional relationship in which nurses respect our decisions in the care of our patients.

In addition, female physicians are scrutinized more than their male colleagues; research shows that referring physicians penalize women surgeons more severely than men surgeons after an unfavorable patient outcome.

Another double standard contributes to the leadership gender gap that exists in business and in medicine: Women job applicants who are self-promoting and express stereotypically masculine traits such as a desire to lead are found to be less hireable than men. This places women in a double bind such that they can be seen as competent or likeable, but typically not both.

Psychologists have termed these challenges the “labyrinth of leadership” for women. As ambitious women navigate their careers, in addition to being competent and hard-working, they must overcome these significant gender-related challenges their male colleagues do not face.

Even if all of that were not enough to make women angry, the recent Supreme Court confirmation hearings brought to the forefront, once again, the anger and hurt that many women experienced in November 2016, when a man who openly demeaned women was elevated over an extremely qualified woman candidate. This was more than a slap in the face. It felt like a condemnation of our gender.

Simply expressing anger, though, likely won’t result in the outcomes we desire. Knowing what the data show, the smartest move for women at this point is to transform that anger into productivity and collective action, whether that means running for office, voting or taking care of ourselves and other women.

Dr. Arghavan Salles is an assistant professor of surgery at Washington University in St. Louis. Follow her on Twitter @arghavan_salles.