“Having it all” or “doing it all”? Perceived trait attributes and behavioral obligations as a function of workload, parenthood, and gender

The perceived warmth and competence of men and women who varied in number of hours worked and childcare responsibilities were assessed using either subjective trait ratings or objective behavioral frequency estimates. Trait ratings were determined by number of hours worked, and not target gender. Estimates of behavioral frequency indicated that women and men were viewed as equally likely to engage in work related competence behaviors, but that women were expected to perform more warmth related behaviors, and their childcare responsibilities remained more constant regardless of hours worked. Thus although trait perceptions are driven by individuating information regarding time distributiontoworkand home,genderaffectsjudgmentsofwhoperformschildcare related taskssuchthatwomen continue to be viewed as more likely to deal with these. Copyright # 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. In her bid for the Democratic presidential nomination, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton has struggled to find the right balance in projecting a persona of competence without seeming too harsh or cold. These personality dimensions, competence and warmth, have a long and rich history in psychology as perhaps the two fundamental dimensions of social perception (Fiske, Cuddy, Glick, & Xu, 2002; Rosenberg, Nelson, & Vivekananthan, 1968), and evidence suggests that at least undersome conditionsperceivedstandingonthetwo dimensionstradeoffagainstone another (Judd,James-Hawkins, Yzerbyt, & Kashima, 2005). For those interested in gender equality, these findings raise concerns that as women gain access to professional domains, they experience a cost to perceived warmth in exchange for increased competence, and that professional women who have children may be seen as warmer, but less competent. Some research suggests this may be the case (Correll, Benard, & Paik, 2007; Cuddy, Fiske, & Glick, 2004; Peplau & Fingerhut, 2004), but importantly the work to date manipulates only gender and parental status. When individuating information is provided with respect to the distribution of time spent at work versus caring for young children, how does this combine with gender in driving person perception? Several literatures suggest that such information should figure prominently. For example, Locksley, Hepburn, and Ortiz (1982) argue that individuating information regarding specificbehaviorsperformed byan individualoverride the effectsof social category information on predictions of future stereotype relevant behavior. Social Role Theory (Eagly, Wood, & Diekman, 2000) also suggests that it is specific role relevant behavior that drives trait perceptions, not social category membership. Both of these lines of work predict that when targets vary in time spent on childrearing versus work related tasks, it is this variation that should drive trait perceptions of competence and warmth, and not target gender. At the same time, work on the Shifting Standards Model (Biernat & Manis, 1994) suggests that trait judgments can mistakenly appear to show no effect of social category because respondents use different definitions for the scale values as