Sara Winslow had been working in sales for almost 20 years when things started to get uncomfortable.

It was 2020. She was in her early forties, and by any conventional measure, she was thriving. She had just won an internal company award for bringing in the biggest sales account the previous year. But not everyone was celebrating her success.

In meetings, she says, some of her male colleagues would challenge and undermine her. Tensions came to a head in July 2020, when, after a particularly bitter dispute, one of those men sent her a series of emails she describes as “disparaging.” In one, he referred to her as a “savant.” It came across as “sarcastic, antagonistic, and mocking,” she says.

The next year, the man who wrote that email was promoted to become her manager. He subsequently assigned her the smallest sales territory in the country. Winslow, who is based in Los Angeles, believed she was being punished for speaking up.

“The sales organization had become a boys’ club,” she says. “And in my experience, it wasn’t simply a culture that excluded women. It was one that seemed particularly uncomfortable with intelligent, competent women.”

Winslow’s experience potentially points to a tension that researchers have been investigating for years: Men may admire intelligent women in principle, yet respond very differently when confronted with their intelligence in person. 

In one study , published in 2015, men expressed greater romantic interest in women who outperformed them on intelligence tests when considering them hypothetically.

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