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.

性别规范塑造了对女性和男性应该如何表现的期望，那些偏离这些规范的人通常会受到社会和职业方面的惩罚。然而，这些惩罚并不总是发生，有时女性和男性甚至会因从事反刻板行为而获得奖励。目前，对于人们为什么以及何时会对违反性别规范的行为做出积极或消极的反应，我们还没有一个清晰的理论理解。在本文中，我们结合了角色一致性、状态不一致假说和预期违例理论的预测，提出了一个统一的理论来预测对反刻板印象的女性和男性的反应。这里提出的模型解释了为什么反刻板行为会同时受到惩罚和奖励，并解释了为什么女性通常会因从事男性刻板行为而面临处罚，而男性只因一小部分女性刻板行为而受到惩罚。这个统一的框架促进了我们对违反性别规范的反应的理解，并为未来旨在识别和预防社会性别不平等的研究奠定了基础。