Forbes: Why Is It That Women Are Seen As Less Competent

Source: www.forbes.com/sites/85broads/2011/04/14/why-is-it-that-women-are-seen-as-less-competent/#39274906d32b

Quotes:

“gender schemas: culturally bound assumptions about men and women that are unconscious.”

“One assumption is that women are first assumed incompetent until proven otherwise. It’s the opposite for men. So right from the start women are not perceived as leaders. If a woman is successful it’s because she’s a hard worker, or was lucky; if she fails it’s because she’s incompetent. If a male succeeds, it’s because he’s competent; if he fails it’s because of bad luck or a scandal.”

“Consequently, cultural biases consistently overrate men and underrate women. Self-assessment studies show that men and women do the same to themselves. Women tend to evaluate themselves two points lower than reality, while men will evaluate themselves two points higher.”

“In one global experiment called the “Goldberg paradigm,” researchers asked men and women in one group to evaluate a particular article or speech supposedly written by a man. Then they asked a similar group to judge the same material, this time supposedly authored by a woman. In countries all over the world, participants rated the very same words higher coming from a man than from a woman.”

“The fact that women often assume other women are incompetent may, in part, explain why women traditionally haven’t been so great at helping each other up the ladder. That’s changing however, with the plethora of organizations and initiatives dedicated to women supporting women. A revolution is underway; a level of collaboration among women as we have never seen before.”

“Some women use the negative gender schemas against them to their advantage. These women play along as if they don’t know what’s going on, when in reality they are five steps ahead of the guys. As Mae West put it, “Brains are an asset, if you hide them.” Being under-estimated can work to women’s advantage when she is covertly outsmarting him, but that’s a short-term benefit. In the end, feigning ignorance only helps perpetuate a misperception. As one of my favorite leaders, Linda Rusch, former VP of nursing in Hunderton Medical, told me, “What you permit, you promote.””

Nature: German University Head Lauds Progress of Women Scientists

Source: www.nature.com/news/2011/110410/full/news.2011.223.html

Quotes:

“The professors are predominantly men, and they seek out other men to be their assistants and successors. The men have excellent networking systems, and the unwritten rules of the academic game have been designed by them. It is no surprise, then, that men dominate academic committees, and continue to perpetuate themselves in academia.”

“It is an opportunity for us to identify our research strengths and decide where we want to create a major research focus – and what infrastructures should support them. It’s also an opportunity to try to recreate the Humboldtian philosophy that teaching and research should be closely connected. Economy-driven demands have made many of us lose touch with these principles.”

“We have to take off the pressure. Scientists are expected to generate floods of papers to get grants or promotion. That doesn’t always give them time to do thorough science, to replicate their data properly and perform the necessary quality control before publication. It doesn’t give them enough time to think. Also, most journals do not have the time to impose good quality control. … If you think about it, even top scientists don’t normally have more than five really ground-breaking papers to their name. But in clinical research you are often expected to have more than five papers a year. How could that be possible if you have true quality control?”

NYTimes: When Women Rule

Source: www.nytimes.com/2008/02/10/opinion/10kristof.html

Quotes:

“A notable share of the great leaders in history have been women: Queen Hatshepsut and Cleopatra of Egypt, Empress Wu Zetian of China, Isabella of Castile, Queen Elizabeth I of England, Catherine the Great of Russia, and Maria Theresa of Austria.”

“Scholars find that women, compared with men, tend to excel in consensus-building and certain other skills useful in leadership. If so, why have female political leaders been so much less impressive in the democratic era?”

“In monarchies, women who rose to the top dealt mostly with a narrow elite, so they could prove themselves and get on with governing. But in democracies in the television age, female leaders also have to navigate public prejudices — and these make democratic politics far more challenging for a woman than for a man.”

“In particular, one lesson from this research is that promoting their own successes is a helpful strategy for ambitious men. But experiments have demonstrated that when women highlight their accomplishments, that’s a turn-off. And women seem even more offended by self-promoting females than men are.”

“A woman can be perceived as competent or as likable, but not both.”

“Clothing and appearance generally matter more for women than for men, research shows. Surprisingly, several studies have found that it’s actually a disadvantage for a woman to be physically attractive when applying for a managerial job. Beautiful applicants received lower ratings, apparently because they were subconsciously pegged as stereotypically female and therefore unsuited for a job as a boss.”

“An M.I.T. economist, Esther Duflo, looked at India, which has required female leaders in one-third of village councils since the mid-1990s. … by objective standards, the women ran the villages better than men. For example, women constructed and maintained wells better, and took fewer bribes. Yet ordinary villagers themselves judged the women as having done a worse job, and so most women were not re-elected. That seemed to result from simple prejudice.”

“Modern democracies may empower deep prejudices and thus constrain female leaders in ways that ancient monarchies did not.”

Spelke-vs-Pinker on Gender & Science + Follow-up

The Science of Gender and Science

On January 16th, 2005, Lawrence Summers (President of Harvard), made a few public comments on women’s careers in science and engineering, suggesting that the gender difference is due to “different availability of aptitude at the high end” rather than discrimination and/or socialisation. These remarks sturred further public discussion on the under-representation of women in tenure-track faculty in elite universities in physical science, math and engineering, sciences (with preponderant emphasis on US). 

On April 22, 2005, Elisabeth Spelke and Steven Pinker held a debate under the Harvard University’s Mind/Brain/Behavior Initiative, focusing “on the research on mind, brain, and behavior that may be relevant to gender disparities in the sciences, including the studies of bias, discrimination and innate and acquired difference between the sexes”.

The debate can be watched here, and the slides of both speakers are available there.

Source: www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Hb3oe7-PJ8

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