Anxiety, women and high-pressure situations: what you can do about it

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Dealing with something high-stakes at work? Unfortunately, you're probably more anxious than your male colleagues.

It turns out, risky situations tend to increase anxiety in women but not in men, according to a new study presented at the 109th Annual Meeting of the American Sociological Association. And in women, that stress can seriously thwart performance.

For the study, researchers at Stanford University conducted two experiments to evaluate how risky work situations affected anxiety and performance in men and women.

In the first experiment, participants read one of four different workplace scenarios that were written in either a risky or non-risky way (think: working with judgmental vs. supportive colleagues). After reading and then writing about how they would deal with the situation, participants took an anxiety test.

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Researchers found that when situations sounded risky, women scored 13.6 per cent higher on the anxiety test than if the situations seemed safe. Meanwhile, men performed the same on the test, regardless of the risk involved.

Next, to determine how this risky situation-related anxiety affected performance, researchers tasked men and women with completing 20 SAT verbal questions and told them they could bet money on each of their answers (bring on the cold sweats).

After controlling for general SAT verbal ability, researchers found that women who betted answered 11 per cent fewer questions correctly compared to men. Uh oh.

Finally, researchers examined scores from two undergraduate engineering class exams. While the midterm required students to state their confidence in each of their answers - which then influenced the scoring of the test - the final exam did not.

The effect: women's grades on the midterm were about half a letter grade lower than men's grades, while, on the final exam, they were the same.

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So why don't women perform as well under pressure? It might be because risky situations are actually riskier for women than they are for men, says study author Susan R. Fisk, a doctoral candidate in sociology at Stanford University.

She notes that even when women perform on par with men, their performance is typically perceived as worse - and it's more likely to be chalked up to incompetence rather than happenstance. What's more, failure (even if imagined by others) can reinforce self-doubt.

It's a pretty sucky situation, really. But the best thing you can do is shore up your self-esteem before heading into any high-pressure situations - whether they are at work, school, or anywhere else.

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