Delusions of Gender (9 page)

The scalp serves as no barrier at all to the psychologically draining or boosting effects of pervasive cultural beliefs. And, as we’ll see in the next chapter, social clues as to who belongs where also travel easily from environment to mind.

I
n the opening of her book
Brain Gender
, Cambridge University psychobiologist Melissa Hines dryly reports on the experience of being, in 1969, a member of the first freshman class at Princeton University to include women. Having been assigned by the university to what was described as a ‘two-man room’, she was allocated to a precept leader who ‘called me Mr Hines for several weeks, apparently before realising that I was not male.’
¹
A similar confusion over sex identity surrounded Sally Haslanger, now a philosophy professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. When she received a distinction in her graduate exams, ‘it seemed funny to everyone to suggest I should get a blood test to determine if I was really a woman.’
²

Mary Beard, a classics professor at Cambridge University, recalls the Roman epigraphy classes she took as an undergraduate in the 1970s, ‘where her tutor would pose “clever questions for the clever men and domestic questions for the dumb girls”.’
³
At least there
were
questions for the ‘girls’. Mary Mullarkey, who eventually became Chief Justice of the Colorado Supreme Court, was one of the few women to be enrolled at Harvard Law School in 1965. Although it had been fifteen years since the decision to admit women, she describes the change as still being, to many, ‘a raw wound’. Mullarkey and her friend Pamela (Burgy) Minzer (destined to become Justice of the New Mexico Supreme Court), waited in vain to be called upon in their property class. Asking a
woman to answer a question about law was an event considered by the professor of the class best limited to ‘Ladies’ Day’. The topic for that day, when it finally arrived, was marital gifts:

Leaning over, [Professor] Casner said to me, ‘Miss Mullarkey, if you were engaged – and I notice you’re not’ – he paused for laughter – ‘would you have to return the ring if you broke the engagement?’ That was the sole question asked of me in a full-year property class.
⁴

Nor, Mullarkey and Burgy found, was a degree from Harvard Law School the same ticket to successful employment that it was for their male counterparts. Even though the federal Civil Rights Act, passed in 1964, prohibited employment discrimination based on gender, strangely, the law firms seemed unaware of the legal situation. ‘It was commonplace for a law firm recruiter to tell a woman to her face that, although he would be willing to hire her, his senior partners or the firm’s clients would never agree to have a female lawyer’, Mullarkey recalls.
⁵

It doesn’t require any special sociological training to read the barely veiled message being communicated to these talented and ambitious women:
You don’t belong here
. We tend to think of this sort of outright sex discrimination as being a thing of the past in Western, industrialised nations.
The Sexual Paradox
author Susan Pinker, for instance, writes of barriers to women as having been ‘stripped away’.
⁶
Her book is peopled with women who, when asked if they’ve ever experienced ill-treatment because of their sex, scratch their heads and search the memory banks in vain for some anecdote that will show how they have had to struggle against the odds stacked against women. As we’ll see in a later chapter, blatant, intentional discrimination against women is far from being something merely to be read about in history books. But here we’re going to look at the subtle, off-putting,
you don’t belong
messages that churn about in the privacy of one’s own mind.

As we learned in the previous chapter, women who are invested in masculine domains often have to perform in the unpleasant and unrewarding atmosphere created by stereotype threat. Anxiety, depletion of working memory, lowered expectations, and frustration can all ensue. But there is a solution, albeit a rather radical one. As Claude Steele observed, ‘women may reduce their stereotype threat substantially by moving across the hall from math to English class’.
⁷
Stereotype threat can do more than impair performance – it can also reduce interest in cross-gender activities.

A striking demonstration of this was provided by Mary Murphy and her colleagues at Stanford University. Advanced maths, science and engineering (MSE) majors were asked to give their opinion on an advertising video ‘for an MSE summer leadership conference that Stanford was considering hosting the next summer’.
⁸
Under the cover story that the researchers were also interested in physiological reactions to the video, heart rate and skin conductance were recorded, to give a measure of arousal. After watching the ad, the students were asked questions to assess how much they felt they would belong at such a conference, and how interested they were in attending. There were two, near-identical videos, depicting about 150 people. However, in one video the ratio of men to women approximated the actual gender ratio of MSE degrees: there were three men to every woman. In the second video, men and women were featured in equal numbers. Women who saw the gender-equal video responded very much like men, both physiologically and in their sense of belonging and interest in the conference. But for women who saw the more realistically imbalanced version, it was a very different experience. They became more aroused – an indicator of physiological vigilance. They expressed less interest in attending the conference when it was gender unbalanced. (Interestingly, so did men – although this was probably, one can’t help but think, for different reasons.) And although women and men who saw the gender-balanced video very strongly agreed that they belonged there, the conviction of
this agreement among women who saw a gender imbalance was significantly lower. Under the naturalistic condition of male dominance, they were no longer so sure that they belonged.

Being outnumbered by men is simply a fact of life for women in MSE domains – as is being exposed to gender stereotypes in advertising. At first, it’s not obvious why an advertisement depicting, say, a woman bouncing on her bed in rapture over a new acne product might serve as a psychic obstacle to women looking to enter masculine fields. However, images of women fretting over their appearance or in ecstasy over a brownie mix, although they have nothing to do with mathematical ability directly, nonetheless make gender stereotypes in general more accessible. Paul Davies and his colleagues showed either these or neutral commercials to women and men who were invested in doing well in maths. They were then given a GRE-like exam that had both maths and verbal problems. Men in both conditions, and women who had seen neutral ads, attempted more maths problems than verbal ones. But women who had seen the sexist ads showed exactly the opposite pattern, avoiding the maths questions. Their career aspirations were also influenced, with a flipping of occupational preferences, from those that require strong mathematical skills (like engineer, mathematician, computer scientist, physicist and so on) to those that depend more heavily on verbal abilities (such as author, linguist and journalist).
⁹
Ads that trade in ditzy stereotypes of women also, Davies and colleagues found, reduce women’s interest in taking on a leadership role. Male and female university students were equally interested in leading a group – except for women exposed to the gender-stereotyped commercials, who were more likely to choose a nonleadership role instead.
¹⁰

Entrepreneurship is another male-dominated arena, and one in which the traits usually assumed to be vital for success – strong-willed, resolute, aggressive, risk-taking – have a decidedly male feel. Here, then, is another occupational niche to which women could easily be made to feel that they don’t belong. Female business school students were given one of two fabricated newspaper articles
to read. One described entrepreneurs as creative, well-informed, steady and generous – and claimed that these qualities are shared equally between men and women. The other article, however, depicted the prototypical entrepreneur as aggressive, risk-taking and autonomous, all traits that belong firmly in the male stereotype. The women were then asked how interested they were in being self-employed, and owning a small or high-growth business. For women who scored low on a proactive measure (the tendency to ‘show initiative, identify opportunities, act on them, and persevere until they meet their objectives’) it made no difference which article they read. But what about the highly proactive women? As you might expect of these go-getting women, their interest in an entrepreneurial career was high but significantly reduced after reading the entrepreneurship-equals-male news article.
¹¹

What psychological processes lie behind this turning away from masculine interests? One possibility is that, as we learned in an earlier chapter, when stereotypes of women become salient, women tend to incorporate those stereotypical traits into their current self-perception. They may then find it harder to imagine themselves as, say, a mechanical engineer. The belief that one will be able to fit in, to belong, may be more important than we realise – and may help to explain why some traditionally male occupations have been more readily entered by women than others.
¹²
After all, the stereotype of a vet is not the same as that of an orthopaedic surgeon or a computer scientist, and these are different again from the stereotype of a builder or a lawyer. These different stereotypes may be more or less easily reconciled with a female identity. What, for example, springs to mind when you think of a computer scientist? A man, of course, but not just any man. You’re probably thinking of the sort of man who would not be an asset at a tea party. The sort of man who leaves a trail of soft-drink cans, junk-food wrappers, and tech magazines behind him as he makes his way to the sofa to watch
Star Trek
for the hundredth time. The sort of man whose pale complexion hints alarmingly of vitamin D deficiency. The sort of man, in short, who is a geek.

Sapna Cheryan, a psychologist at Washington University, was interested in whether the geek image of computer science plays a role in putting off women. When she and her colleagues surveyed undergraduates about their interest in being a computer science major, they found, perhaps unsurprisingly given that computer science is male-dominated, that women were significantly less interested. Less obvious, however, was
why
they were less interested. Women felt that they were less similar to the typical computer science major. This influenced their sense that they belonged in computer science – again lower in women – and it was this lack of fit that drove their lack of interest in a computer science major.
¹³

However, an interest in
Star Trek
and an antisocial lifestyle may not, in fact, be unassailable correlates of talent in computer programming. Indeed, in its early days, computer programming was a job done principally by women and was regarded as an activity to which feminine talents were particularly well suited. ‘Programming requires lots of patience, persistence and a capacity for detail and those are traits that many girls have’ wrote one author of a career guide to computer programming in 1967.
¹⁴
Women made many significant contributions to computer science development and, as one expert puts it, ‘[t]oday’s achievements in software are built on the shoulders of the first pioneering women programmers.’
¹⁵
Cheryan suggests that ‘[i]t was not until the 1980s that individual heroes in computer science, such as Bill Gates and Steve Jobs came to the scene, and the term “geek” became associated with being technically minded. Movies such as
Revenge of the Nerds
and
Real Genius
, released during these years, crystallized the image of the “computer geek” in the cultural consciousness.’
¹⁶

If it is the geeky stereotype that is so off-putting to women, then a little repackaging of the field might be an effective way of drawing more women in. Cheryan and her colleagues tested this very idea. They recruited undergraduates to participate in a study by the ‘Career Development Center regarding interest in technical jobs and internships.’ The students filled out a questionnaire about their interest in computer science in a small classroom within the
William Gates Building (which, as you will have guessed, houses the computer science department). The room, however, was set up in one of two ways for the unsuspecting participant. In one condition, the décor was what we might call geek chic: a
Star Trek
poster, geeky comics, video game boxes, junk food, electronic equipment and technical books and magazines. The second arrangement was substantially less geeky: the poster was an art one, water bottles replaced the junk food, the magazines were general interest and the computer books were aimed at a more general level. In the geeky room, men considered themselves significantly more interested in computer science than did women. But when the geek factor was removed from the surroundings, women showed equal interest to men. It seemed that a greater sense of belonging brought about this positive change. Simply by altering the décor, Cheryan and colleagues were also able to increase women’s interest in, for example, joining a hypothetical Web-design company. The researchers note ‘the power of environments to signal to people whether or not they should enter a domain’, and suggest that changing the computer science environment ‘can therefore inspire those who previously had little or no interest … to express a new-found interest in it.’
¹⁷