Dirty Heroes? Healthcare Workers’ Experience of Mixed Social Evaluations during the Pandemic

The sudden onset of the COVID-19 pandemic ushered in an unprecedented era of public admiration for healthcare workers. Indeed, the title “healthcare heroes” became a ubiquitous moniker for healthcare providers of all stripes during the pandemic, a sentiment reflected in countless advertisements and banners. Paradoxically, these same “healthcare heroes” who were being publicly celebrated for their work in the fight against a novel coronavirus also faced stigma for their work amid the virus and infected patients. Using grounded theory, we document how stigmatized members of an occupation experience and respond to mixed—and even conflicting—social evaluations. We contribute to the literature on stigma and social evaluations more broadly by showing how targets of stigma evaluate their evaluators through nuanced logical and emotional processing and, moreover, that such processing can lead recipients of mixed evaluations toward a number of outcomes not previously theorized. We explore the concept of “dirty heroes,” where workers are celebrated and stigmatized along distinct dimensions of work traditionally studied in dirty work (i.e., physical, social, and moral). Our findings further illustrate how high-legitimacy occupations can be subject to “hero-washing,” whereby workers are publicly celebrated yet privately neglected.