A Bright Woman is Caught in a Double Bind

Matina Horner

Reprinted in Steiger, Richard and Roy A. Helton, Jr. Going to the Source. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 1989.

After earning a Ph.D. in psychology, Matina Horner (b. 1939) published this widely read and influential article in 1969. It is based on the results of her research into the question of women and success. She describes her findings in the concept of the "double bind." Horner later became president of Radcliffe College (Steiger and Helton’s headnote). The following is an abridged version of Horner’s original essay.

1. In 1953, David McClelland, John Atkinson and colleagues published the first major work on the "achievement motive." Through the use of the Thematic Apperception Test (TAT), they were able to isolate the psychological characteristic of the need to achieve. This seemed to be an internalized standard of excellence, motivating the individual to do well in any achievement-oriented situation involving intelligence and leadership ability. Subsequent investigators studied innumerable facets of achievement motivation: How it is instilled in children, how it is expressed, how it relates to social class, even how it is connected to the rise and fall of civilizations. The result of all this research is an impressive and a theoretically consistent body of data about the achievement motive—in men.

2. Women, however, are conspicuously absent from almost all of the studies. In the few cases where the ladies were included, the results were contradictory or confusing. So women were eventually left out altogether…. To help remedy this lopsided state of affairs, I undertook to explore the basis for sex differences in achievement motivation. But where to begin?

3. My first clue came from the one consistent finding on the women: they get higher test anxiety scores than do the men. Eleanor Maccoby has suggested that the girl who is motivated to achieve is defying conventions of what girls "should" do. As a result, the intellectual woman pays a price in anxiety….

4. Thus, consciously or unconsciously the girl equates intellectual achievement with loss of femininity. A bright woman is caught in a double bind. In testing and other achievement-oriented situations she worries not only about failure, but also about success. If she fails, she is not living up to her own standards of performance; if she succeeds she is not living up to societal expectations about the female role. Men in our society do not experience this kind of ambivalence, because they are not only permitted but actively encouraged to do well.

5. For women, then the desire to achieve is often contaminated by what I call the motive to avoid success. I define it as the fear that success in competitive achievement situations will lead to negative consequences, such as unpopularity or loss of femininity….

6. I began my study with several hypotheses about the motive to avoid success:

1. Of course it would be far more characteristic of women than of men.

2. It would be more characteristic of women who are capable of success and who are career-oriented than of women not so motivated. Women who are not seeking success should not, after all, be threatened by it.

3. I anticipated that the anxiety over success would be greater in competitive situations than in noncompetitive ones (when one works alone). The aggressive, masculine aspects of achievement striving are certainly more pronounced in competitive settings, particularly when the opponent is male. Women’s anxiety should therefore be greatest when they compete with men.

7. I administered the standard TAT achievement motivation measures to a sample of 90 girls and 88 boys, all undergraduates at the University of Michigan. In addition, I asked each to tell a story based on the clue…: After first-term finals, John (Anne) finds himself (herself) at the top of his (her) medical-school class. The girls wrote about Anne, the boys about John.

8. The stories were scored for the "motive to avoid success" if they expressed any negative imagery that reflected concern about doing well. Generally, such imagery fell into one of three categories:

1. The most frequent Anne story reflected strong fears of social rejection as a result of doing well. The girls in this group showed anxiety about [Anne] becoming unpopular, unmarriageable and lonely….

2. Girls in the second category were less concerned with issues of social approval or disapproval; they were more worried about definitions of womanhood. Their stories expressed guilt and despair over [Anne’s] success, and doubts about [her] femininity or normality.

3. The third group of stories did not even try to confront the ambivalence about doing well. Girls in this category simply denied the possibility that any mere woman could be so successful. Some of them completely changed the content of the clue, or distorted it, or refused to believe it, or absolved Anne of responsibility for her success.

9. Fifty-nine girls—over 65 percent—told stories that fell into one or another of the above categories. But only eight boys, fewer than 10 percent, showed evidence of the motive to avoid success…. They expressed unequivocal delight at John’s success…and projected a grand and glorious future for him. There was none of the hostility, bitterness and ambivalence that the girls felt for Anne. In short, the difference between male and female stories based on essentially the same clue were enormous…. Success inhibits social life for the girls; it enhances social life for the boys.

10. Earlier I suggested that the motive to avoid success is especially aroused in competitive situations. In the second part of this study, I wanted to see whether the aggressive overtones of competition against men scared the girls away. Would competition raise their anxiety about success and thus lower their performance?

11. First I put all of the students together in a large competitive group and gave them a series of achievement tests (verbal and arithmetic). I then assigned them randomly to one of three other experimental conditions. One-third worked on a similar set of tests, each in competition with a member of the same sex. One-third third competed against a member of the opposite sex. The last third worked alone.

12. Ability is an important factor in achievement motivation research…. One way of avoiding this problem [skewed measurement of achievement motivation due to variation in ability] is to use each subject as his own control; that is, the performance of an individual working alone can be compared with his score in competition. Ability thus remains constant; any change in score must be due to motivational factors. This control over ability was, of course, possible only for the last third of my subjects: the 30 girls and 30 boys who had worked alone and in the large group competition. I decided to look at their scores first.

13. Performance changed dramatically over the two situations. A large number of the men did far better when they were in competition than when they worked alone. For the women the reverse was true. Fewer than one-third of the women, but more than two-thirds of the men, got significantly higher scores in competition.

14. When we looked at just the girls in terms of the motive to avoid success, the comparisons were even more striking…. Seventy-seven percent of the girls who feared success did better alone than in competition. Women who were low on the motive, however, behaved more like the men: 93 percent of them got higher scores in competition….

Female Fear of Success & Performance
	Perform better working alone	Perform better in competition
High fear of success	13	4
Low fear of success	1	12

15. As a final test of motivational differences, I asked the students to indicate on a scale of 1 to 100 "How important was it for you to do well in this situation?" The high-fear-of-success-girls said that it was much more important for them to do well when they worked alone than when they worked in either kind of competition. For the low-fear girls, such difference were not statistically significant. Their test scores were higher in competition, as we saw, and they thought that it was important to succeed no matter what the setting. And in all experimental conditions—working alone, or in competition against males or females—high-fear women consistently lagged behind their fearless comrades on the importance of doing well.

16. These findings suggest that most women will fully explore their intellectual potential only when they do not need to compete—and least of all when they are competing with men. This was most true of women with a strong anxiety about success….

17. We can see from this small study that achievement motivation in women is much more complex than the some drive in men. Most men do not find many inhibiting forces in their path if they are able and motivated to succeed. As a result, they are not threatened by competition; in fact, surpassing an opponent is a source of pride and enhanced masculinity.

18. If a woman sets out to do well, however, she bumps into a number of obstacles. She learns that it really isn’t ladylike to be too intellectual. She is warned that men will treat her with distrustful tolerance at best, and outright prejudice at worst, if she pursues a career….

19. In recent years, many legal and educational barriers to female achievement have been removed; but it is clear that a psychological barrier remains. The motive to avoid success has an all-too-important influence on the intellectual and professional lives of women in our society.