Type B Personality in Women: What the Research Actually Shows

The type page carries the full description, so this is the short version. Type B is the low-scoring end of a single severity scale rather than a separate category with its own test. It describes three things: low time urgency, which shows up as real comfort with waiting and a preference for finishing one thing before starting another; a lighter relationship with competition, where achievement is measured against a personal standard rather than against other people; and a slow fuse, where frustration takes longer to build and rarely turns into hostility.

The label came out of the same 1959 work by cardiologists Meyer Friedman and Ray Rosenman that produced Type A. Type B was the comparison group: the patients who did not show the hard-driving, hostile-prone profile the researchers were studying. It was defined by absence, which is worth remembering whenever a source describes Type B as a personality in its own right.

None of those three components is a claim about women or men. They are trait descriptions, and this page sticks to that level deliberately. There is no female version of the Type B pattern, no separate scoring, and nothing in the literature that would support advice depending on the reader's sex. What there is, and what the rest of this page covers, is published data on the traits underneath the pattern, on how a relaxed style gets evaluated, and on what the health research can and cannot say.

One thing to clear up first. Searches for type b personality female often expect a frequency figure, a percentage of women who are Type B. There is no sound number to give. The original Western Collaborative Group Study cohort was men only, our own test reports a continuous score rather than a census of band membership by sex, and any percentage circulating online comes from self-selected samples rather than from a population survey. Rather than invent a figure, this page says plainly that none has been established.

The Type A and B components, urgency, competitiveness and hostility, overlap with better-studied personality traits, and that is where the measured differences live. In the most cited aspect-level study, Weisberg, DeYoung and Hirsh reported in Frontiers in Psychology in 2011, with a sample of 2,643 people, that women scored higher on average on agreeableness, with a Cohen's d of 0.48, and on neuroticism, with a d of 0.39. Within agreeableness, compassion came out at 0.45 and politeness at 0.36. Within neuroticism, withdrawal was 0.40 and volatility 0.30.

The results relevant to the drive side of Type A are smaller and go the other way or nowhere. Assertiveness showed a d of minus 0.09, with men marginally higher. Extroversion overall was 0.08, conscientiousness 0.06 and openness 0.02, the last two not statistically significant in that sample. In other words, the traits most closely tied to competitiveness and pace showed little average difference by sex, while the differences that did appear were on warmth and on negative emotion.

The effect sizes matter more than the direction. A d of 0.4 describes a substantial overlap between two distributions: knowing someone's sex tells you very little about where they sit, and any individual is as likely to be an exception as not. A difference of this size is a fact about averages in a sample, and it is not a basis for predicting one person's pace, temper or ambition.

The caveats the authors state are worth repeating. Everything was self-reported, so the results may reflect how people describe themselves rather than how they behave or how others see them. The sample was mainly North American and drawn from university, community and online sources. The data were cross-sectional, so they say nothing about change over time. And one instrument was used, so the findings are tied to that measure.

There is one directly relevant health-side difference. In the 2009 meta-analysis by Chida and Steptoe in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology, the harmful association between anger and hostility and later coronary events in initially healthy populations was larger in men than in women. That is a group-level finding about a specific component, and it is an argument for taking the hostility component seriously rather than for reading anything into one person's score.

The type page names the most common cost of this pattern: being underestimated. A relaxed pace reads to a more urgent colleague as a lack of drive, and in a culture that rewards visible hustle, a Type B pattern has to work harder to make its output legible. That is true regardless of who holds the pattern, and it is the main practical disadvantage of the low end of this scale.

There is also published work on how the same behavior gets evaluated differently depending on who is doing it. Eagly and Karau's role congruity theory, set out in Psychological Review in 2002, argues that prejudice toward women leaders arises from a mismatch between expectations attached to the female gender role and expectations attached to the leader role, producing two effects: less favorable evaluation of women as potential leaders, and less favorable evaluation of the same leadership behavior when a woman performs it. That is a finding about how evaluations work in organizations, not a claim about the traits of the person being evaluated.

Set those two together and the honest version is this. A calm, unhurried, low-hostility style is an asset in many settings and is undervalued in settings that read speed as commitment, and the published evaluation research says that readings of the same behavior are not independent of who performs it. What this page will not do is tell any reader how that plays out for them, because the literature describes average patterns in organizations and cannot speak to one workplace or one person.

The usable consequence is the same for everyone with this pattern: results do not speak for themselves. Saying what got done, in plain terms, at the moments when it is being decided who contributed, is the countermeasure, and it is not self-promotion so much as supplying information the room does not otherwise have.

Start with the part that did not hold. The original claim that the broad Type A pattern causes coronary heart disease has not survived the larger prospective research. Myrtek's 2001 meta-analysis of prospective studies in the International Journal of Cardiology found no meaningful association between the overall Type A pattern and coronary heart disease. The dramatic version of the theory, the one that made the label famous in the 1970s, is not supported.

One component has held up, modestly. Chida and Steptoe's 2009 meta-analysis found that anger and hostility were associated with increased coronary events, with a combined hazard ratio of 1.19 in initially healthy populations and 1.24 in people with existing coronary disease. That is a real but small effect, pooled across cohorts, with indications of publication bias acknowledged by the authors. Low hostility, which is the defining feature of a strong Type B result, sits on the favorable side of that specific finding, and that is as far as the inference goes.

Women were studied, and the most relevant source is the Framingham work. Haynes, Feinleib and Kannel reported in the American Journal of Epidemiology in 1980 on 1,674 initially coronary-free participants followed for eight years. Among women aged 45 to 64, those who developed coronary heart disease scored higher on the Framingham Type A behavior scale and on suppressed hostility, described as not showing or discussing anger, and in multivariate models adjusting for standard risk factors, Type A behavior and not discussing anger remained independent predictors. The paper reports roughly twice the coronary heart disease and about three times the angina in Type A women compared with Type B women over that period.

That sounds like a strong result and needs reading carefully. It is a single cohort recruited between 1965 and 1967, using a scale specific to that study, in one age band, in one American town, with self-reported personality measures. It is a group-level association rather than a mechanism, it does not establish that a relaxed pattern protects anyone, and it says nothing about what will happen to a particular reader.

So the honest summary is short. There is no health claim to make for an individual from a Type B result. Group findings cannot tell you about your own blood pressure, sleep, or cardiovascular risk, and a calm manner is not evidence that your body is not under strain. Those questions belong with a clinician, with actual measurements, whether or not you describe yourself as easygoing.

Nothing on this scale needs fixing as a personality. What is worth attention are two specific behaviors the type page identifies at the low end: under-asserting when something genuinely needs a firm response, and letting low urgency turn into postponement on things that matter.

For the first, practice direct statement where the stakes are low. Say which restaurant, name the preference, decline the small request you do not want. The point is not to adopt more urgency; it is to make sure the calm is a choice rather than a default that occasionally costs you something. The practice transfers to the conversations that matter, and it works better than resolving to be firmer in advance of a hard moment.

For the second, supply external structure rather than internal pressure. A stated date, a check-in with someone else, a visible commitment: for a relaxed internal clock these work and self-generated urgency does not. Make a commitment observable, as the type page suggests, by saying what you will do, when the other person can expect it, and how you will flag a delay.

Make the output legible. One sentence in a review or a meeting about what you delivered, specifically, does more than months of hoping a result will be noticed. This is the direct answer to being underestimated, and it is the piece most people with this pattern skip.

And name the pace to the faster people around you. A short sentence telling a manager or a partner that a slow response does not mean low interest closes a gap that otherwise stays open for years. If under-asserting or procrastination is causing real problems at work or at home, a therapist can work on those specifics, and none of this advice depends on the reader's sex.

The four letters do not have equal standing, and it helps to know which is which. Type A comes from 1950s and 1970s cardiology research, and its headline heart-disease link did not replicate cleanly; the hostility component is the part that retained a modest prospective association. Type B is defined as the absence of that pattern rather than as a construct in its own right.

Type C, the subject of its own explainer page, is a contested 1980s hypothesis about emotional suppression and cancer whose proposed link was never established. Type D, described by Johan Denollet and formalized in 2005, combines negative affectivity with social inhibition and has a real, if debated, cardiology research literature behind it.

The Psychology.com Type A Personality Test is a self-assessment informed by that classic research rather than a clinical instrument, and it reports time urgency, achievement striving and hostility as separate components. It is not a diagnosis, it does not estimate anyone's cardiovascular risk, and a low total can still contain one component worth a closer look, which is why the breakdown is the useful part of the result.

The free Psychology.com Type A Personality Test scores time urgency, achievement striving and irritability and places the total on a single scale, with the low band corresponding to the Type B pattern described here and on the type page. Read the component breakdown rather than only the total: a balanced or low score can hide one component that runs high, most often time urgency or irritability, and that single component is the part worth doing something about. The result screen also offers an optional in-depth report for anyone who wants a more detailed breakdown to take to a therapist or coach.

If your total lands higher on the scale, the Type A personality page describes that end of the same spectrum, and the four-way comparison of Type A, B, C and D is on the family index. If what you recognize is holding feelings in and agreeing when you would rather not, the Type C page covers that pattern, which is a separate construct with weaker support and no result on this test. Either way, treat the label as a starting point for reflection about specific behaviors rather than a statement about who you are.