Social status, not gender alone, is implicated in different reactions by women and men to social ostracism

Williams and Sommer found that ostracized women, but not men, worked harder on a subsequent collective task, speculating that women's social compensation was motivated by threatened belongingness. The present 2 x 3 design with 180 U.S. women and men replicated this gender gap in work contributions then closed it using two status-manipulations that favored women's task abilities or the higher education of undergraduates with high school partners. Additional analyses identified three clusters of participants who failed to compensate: only men in the replication control, women scoring low in self-monitoring, and participants who persisted unsuccessfully to resist exclusion. These patterns shift our focus away from gender and threatened belongingness toward control and status as explanations for the original gender difference.