Students at Donald Trump’s alma mater, the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, say the new President is having an adverse effect on men in the workplace, making them sexist and more aggressive.
According to the students who conducted the study, they never set out to prove Trump has made the business world worse for women, but ended up finding the correlation while conducting a “gender bias” study for their economics and public policy class.
The experiment was simple: see how Wharton almuni treated each other when asked to split $20 with an unnamed partner. In some cases, the former students were told the gender of their partner. In other cases, the gender was kept secret. The two had to negotiate the final result, or both walked away with no money.
Before the election, the students say, male and female alumni we cooperative, even generous. After? Not so much.
“Over a series lab experiments, conducted before and after Election Day, they observed a striking result: Post-election, study participants were less cooperative, more likely to use adversarial strategies and less likely to reach an agreement with a partner,” the research concluded. “The effect was driven by an increase in men acting more aggressively toward women.”
It turns out that in the deal-making exercise, some participants began following in Trump’s footsteps, using tactics normally associated with The Art of the Deal, the book Trump wrote on negotiating with your opponents.
Of course, the study is mere correlation, and a number of factors, besides the election could be responsible (participants weren’t asked, explicitly). Even the two students at the helm of the experiment say that, between male and female partners, a sort-of sexism was always present, it just happened to become more overt (at least to them) after Trump won elective office.
In fact, one finding seems to indicate that men might have had greater respect for women in the days after the election, not less.
Before Election day, they say men exhibited a “benevolent sexism,” letting women get the better of the deal in order to make things seem fair. After the Election, men didn’t temper their negotiation tactics, expecting the women to play hardball. That ultimately worked in their favor, as women were less likely to stand up to their more aggressive stance.
That might mean men are getting more sexist. It also might mean, in the wake of Hillary Clinton’s Presidential campaign, they’re treating women without kid gloves.
