The Relative Gender Effect: How Workplace Clothing & Gender Influences First Impressions

One of my earlier and most popular blogs “The Subtle Psychological Power of Workplace Fashion” was based upon the literature review for my MSc thesis. This research looked to understand the question of how ancillary items of clothing, such as lanyards on workers, lapel stripes on military uniforms or stethoscopes & white coats on Doctors effect first impressions of those wearing them. In addition we looked at how gender of the wearer (and respondent) moderates their ratings of first impressions. All within a video call environment.

The results give evidence that prior research exploring this in person environment also transfers to this new digital video call environment. That ancillary items of clothing such as coloured lanyards, lapels or stethoscopes all boost the perceivers first impression of Intelligence, Trustworthiness, Responsibility , Authoritativeness, Organisation and Confidence to a statistically significant amount (p<.005) with small to moderate effect sizes (d=.2-.6). But the gender bias also transferred across from studies done up to 30 years ago (Kwon, 1994; Rehman et al., 2005).

No matter all the progress since 1994 in advanced western societies on gender equality, being a female in 2024 meant you were rated as less confident and authoritative compared to their male colleagues. With males perceived as less trustworthy than their female colleagues (yes these are statistically significant, below p<.001 and moderate to large effect sizes d=.5-.7). Interestingly, the gender of the person doing the rating did not to any statistically significant level effect the rating. So, females were as biased as males when rating within and between genders. This is counter to some prior research which found females were harsher on ratings of other females when not wearing professional ancillary clothing, such as white coats (Kwon, 1994).  

So, why might this happen? What might be the effects on how this influences the skill adaptations of females and males in the workplace? This conversation emerged through a discussion with a female leader within my network after reading this research. A great example of social learning for us both!

First of all, bias is dynamic, it interacts with personality, environments and tasks to create complex dynamics that at an individual level are hard to predict. So, we need be careful not to over extrapolate the results of any study that has to isolate all the normal variables found in daily life (the limitations of any traditional studies).

I might liken the bias different genders experience to a constraint females and males face much like other human invariants. An invariant is a trait that that has a lower variance between environments and tasks, such as height. Except bias is not a physical invariant, but a socially constructed one.

First impressions are important and powerful, but they can be changed (not easily due to confirmation bias). In the same way my height (I am below the average male height) influences my ability to navigate my environment, but I have developed alternative methodologies in environments where a low reach is a disadvantage. For instance, I can jump higher relative to my height vs others who are taller. Why? As the environment forced me to adapt my jumping through years of wanting to play basketball, piggy in the middle, goalkeeper or volleyball with the bigger kids my age. Or simply take back something my 6ft+ brother would hold at arm’s length above his head.

In the same way as being tall affords you certain things easier, being perceived as confident or authoritative affords you the ability to communicate your views and for people to take more seriously your opinions. We frequently hear from females experiencing social silencing (Bayntun-Lees, 2012), being spoken over and ideas not taken seriously compared to male colleagues. This bias invites females to use and thus develop alternative methods such as verbal and physical communication skills and experimenting with different styles of clothing as a few ways to achieve the same end goal. For instance, I as a male am afforded a more relaxed business dress vs a female colleague as my gender means I have a head start I the perception of my confidence and authoritativeness.

The challenge is, what we end up seeing is a success bias. For a male colleague entering the workforce at the same time as a female, the male colleague does not face as much of this bias. Yes, they are young, so also will be perceived as less authoritative but won’t be forced to adapt through developing alternative skills as much as their female colleagues. This may mean we have a higher dropout rate of female’s vs males due to the skills needed to compensate are higher for females then males.

This is much like the relative age effect in kids’ sports. More physical kids get picked due to the environment and task rewarding early physical maturation, less physical kids are forced to adapt more skilful techniques over physical techniques to compete. But the bar is higher, smaller kids need to adapt higher levels of skill, which is why we see drop out. But this inverts at the super elite level. Interestingly, you see disproportionately younger siblings and those born later in the academic year as these are what we might call super adapters (Fumarco et al., 2017). The survival of the fittest. Not fittest just in physical terms but most adapted (fitted) to the needs of the environment. 

So, we have what might be called the relative gender effect. Those females who have survived despite this relative authority/confidence effect have been and are adapting, by developing superior skills in communicating with impact (made up of perceived authority and confidence), with a little help of an already boosted perception of trust, which is quite key in modern leadership (Skipton Leonard et al., 2016). Those who make it to leadership are the super adapters.

Like in sport, organisations need to look where this relative gender effect is most impactful in dropout rates. In addition, providing support and training to help females in the short term adapt to the disadvantage of the relative gender effect. As well as males in areas of building trust.

Bayntun-Lees, D. (2012). Social Silencing A feminist action research inquiry into the hermeneutical injustice of “being silenced” in everyday conversational life A Woman in the World Contents.

Fumarco, L., Gibbs, B. G., Jarvis, J. A., & Rossi, G. (2017). The relative age effect reversal among the National Hockey League elite. PLOS ONE, 12(8), e0182827. https://doi.org/10.1371/JOURNAL.PONE.0182827

Kwon, Y.-H. (1994). The Influence of Appropriateness of Dress and Gender on The Self-Perception of Occupational Attributes. Clothing and Textiles Research Journal, 33–39.

Rehman, S. U., Nietert, P. J., Cope, D. W., & Kilpatrick, A. O. (2005). What to wear today? Effect of doctor’s attire on the trust and confidence of patients. American Journal of Medicine, 118(11), 1279–1286. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.amjmed.2005.04.026

Skipton Leonard, H., Lewis, R., Freedman, A. M., Passmore, J., & Foundations, H. (2016). The Wiley-Blackwell Handbook of the Psychology of Leadership, Change, and Organizational Development, First Edition. Edited by The History and Current Status of Organizational and Systems Change.