Psychology of Women Quarterly, 33 (2009), 275–284. Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Printed in the USA. Copyright C  2009 Division 35, American Psychological Association. 0361-6843/09 IDENTITIES IN HARMONY: GENDER–WORK IDENTITY INTEGRATION MODERATES FRAME SWITCHING IN COGNITIVE PROCESSING Vera Sacharin, Fiona Lee, and Richard Gonzalez University of Michigan Professional women’s identity integration—the perceived compatibility between work and gender identities—plays a role in how task or relationship information is processed. Seventy female business school students were primed with either their professional or their gender identity. Business women with higher identity integration showed an assimilation effect to the primed cue. Specifically, they showed higher task orientation than relationship orientation in a recognition task when primed with their professional identity, but less so when primed with their gender identity. Business women with lower identity integration showed a contrast effect to the primed cue: Their recognition reflected a task-relationship orientation opposite to the primed cue. We discuss the implications of these findings for understanding women’s performance at work. People have several selves. Asked who they are, individ- uals name various identities: groups to which they belong and roles that are important to them. Yet, not all identities interplay harmoniously together. For example, it may be in- compatible to be both homosexual and Catholic, to be both pro-choice and Republican, or (as former Harvard presi- dent Lawrence Summers suggested) to be both a woman and a scientist (Rimer & Healy, 2005). Traditional division of labor between the sexes has re- sulted in gendered occupations and potential strain be- tween being a working professional and being a woman. However, women are now mainstays in corporate America. For example, women held 42.7% of management, busi- ness, and financial operations occupations in 2007 (U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2008), and the percentage of female corporate officers and chief executive officers in the Fortune 500 continues to increase (Black, 2003). Neverthe- less, women are frequently stereotyped negatively as pro- fessional workers (Burgess & Borgida, 1999), often viewed as more warm than competent (Fiske, 2002). Such findings suggest that combining gender and professional identities Vera Sacharin, Fiona Lee, and Richard Gonzalez, Department of Psychology, University of Michigan. We are extremely grateful to Chi-Ying Cheng and Amy Trahan. Address correspondence and reprint requests to: Vera Sacharin, University of Michigan, Department of Psychology, 3020 East Hall, 530 Church Street, Ann Arbor, MI 48109-1043. E-mail: vsachari@umich.edu might continue to be problematic. Thus, as we describe in more detail later, women in professional and manage- rial occupations can experience considerable anxiety and difficulty in negotiating between their work and gender identities (London, 2004; Marshall, 1984; Miller, 2004). Conflicting identities can be managed in a variety of ways. Central to our research is the concept of identity integration, which is the degree to which two social iden- tities are perceived as compatible or in opposition to each other (Benet-Mart´ ınez & Haritatos, 2005; Benet-Mart´ ınez, Leu, Lee, & Morris, 2002). We argue that the integration between gender and work identities influences how profes- sional women react to gender and professional cues in the environment. In this paper, we examine how a woman’s integration of her professional and gender identities affects her task performance on judgment and memory tasks. Reasoning and information processing are central elements in a variety of contexts, such as leadership and negotiation. The impact of a woman’s level of identity integration on basic cognitive processes should therefore be relevant to a variety of other, more complex tasks. Identity Integration A social identity is “that part of an individual’s self-concept which derives from his [sic] knowledge of his member- ship of a social group (or groups) together with the value and emotional significance attached to that membership” (Tajfel, 1981, p. 255). Identities provide a lens through 275