Explaining Penalties and Rewards for Gender Norm Violations: A Unified Theory

Gender norms shape expectations for how women and men should behave, and those who deviate from these norms are often punished, both socially and professionally. However, these penalties do not always occur, and sometimes women and men are even rewarded for engaging in counter-stereotypic behaviors. At present, we do not have a clear theoretical understanding of why and when people will react positively or negatively to gender norm violations. In this paper, we combine the predictions of role congruity, status incongruity hypothesis, and expectancy-violation theories to propose a unified theory for predicting reactions to counter-stereotypic women and men. The model proposed here provides an explanation for why both penalties and rewards occur for counter-stereotypic behaviors and explains why women risk penalties for engaging in masculine-stereotypic behaviors, generally, while men are only penalized for a narrow subset of feminine-stereotypic behaviors. This unified framework advances our understanding of reactions to gender norm violations and provides a foundation for future research aimed at identifying and preventing gender inequality in society.