MSU experiment explains mansplaining and its impact

March 5, 2023 - Kaylie Crowe

 

Mansplaining — the combination of “man” and “explaining” — is a colloquial expression used to describe situations in which a man provides a condescending explanation of something to someone who already understands it. And a new study reveals that its negative impact on women is very real. 

 

Caitlin Briggs, a graduate research fellow at Michigan State University in the College of Social Science, and her colleagues sought to learn more about the true implications of mansplaining. They asked 128 volunteers to imagine they’d been appointed to a committee charged with allocating bonus funds to deserving employees. 

After reviewing descriptions of the shortlisted employee candidates, the volunteers went into a meeting with one of two actors: a man or a woman. In all scenarios, the man or woman actor questioned whether the volunteer understood the nature of the task and proceeded to mansplain it to them. 

“What we found was that women largely had negative outcomes as a result of being mansplained to, whereas it didn’t affect men as much,” said Briggs, whose research was published in the Journal of Business and Psychology. “They [women volunteers] tended to register that their competence was being questioned more than men did, and to attribute this to a gender bias — so, maybe this person doesn’t think highly of me or doesn’t like me because of my gender.”

 

Male volunteers who were given a condescending explanation by a woman did not feel the same. 

“Maybe they perceived it as ‘this person is being rude to me’, but they didn’t perceive it any differently if it came from a man or woman, and they didn’t attribute it to a gender bias,” Briggs said.

Video footage from this research showed that after being spoken to condescendingly by a man, women spoke fewer words. Men, on the other hand, were unaffected. 

While this was a lab experiment, Briggs says these sorts of behaviors could have very real effects on women’s careers and lives at work over time, especially because we don’t know the real rates at which women workers experience mansplaining. Briggs says there are some things we can do to help prevent mansplaining, including bringing greater awareness to the problems related to mansplaining; incorporating information about mansplaining into workplace training; and monitoring recordings of virtual meetings to learn how often people are interrupted or ignored when they try to speak up.