Living Dolls: The Return of Sexism (30 page)

The resurgence of biological determinism, with its traditionalist views of women’s aptitudes, may be strengthening the operation of such stereotypes in certain fields. For instance, between 1997 and 2005 the proportion of women employed in technology industries fell from 27 per cent to 21 per cent.
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In an article in
Management Today
about this phenomenon, the reporter found influential people willing to put at least some of the inequality down to innate aptitudes. Anthony Seldon, headmaster of a large school and father of two girls, was quoted saying, ‘There are differences between boys and girls. Boys are more interested in computers than girls, and it often correlates with maths. It just so happens that girls are more interested in feelings and boys are more interested in things.’ No wonder a Microsoft survey conducted among women in information technology in 2007 concluded that some of them found their careers affected by sexism: ‘Some men discriminate against female colleagues by assuming they have less facility for deeply technical matters.’
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Although many people would like to believe that women do not face discrimination at work any longer, throughout the professional world stereotypes against female leaders can hold women back. The psychologist Virginia Valian has examined much research into the ways that people relate to colleagues, and how they hire and promote others, and has found that this stereotype operates in subtle ways in many different situations. For instance, researchers once asked more than 250 managers to describe the typical characteristics of certain individuals – men in general, male managers, successful male managers, or women in general, female managers and successful female managers. They discovered that when ‘female’ was attached to managers or successful managers, there was a higher likelihood that they would be expected to be bitter, quarrelsome and selfish and less likely that they would be expected to have leadership ability.
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And in a particularly intriguing piece of psychological research carried out in 1990, men and women who had been trained to act according to certain scripted patterns went into groups of participants who didn’t know that these men and women had been trained. The groups were given ten minutes to reach a decision on a certain task – ranking the usefulness of nine items to a person who had crash-landed on the moon. When the trained women took on the role of leader, they received many more negative facial reactions from the participants than the trained men received. Although they acted in an identical fashion as leaders, for the women, the negative reactions outweighed the positive, but for the men, the positive reactions outweighed the negative.
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This imbalance, when played out in everyday life, may go to the heart of why some women may feel that seeking leadership roles in society is just too stressful, and why it is that women sometimes can’t understand why men are drawn to those roles. Is it that women just don’t receive the payoffs that men do in terms of positive reactions from colleagues and peers, however competent they are? After all, even if we were to get equal pay or equal promotion, this would be dust and ashes in our mouths if we weren’t to get that great feeling that having peer approval gives you – that warm sense of being liked and admired, of being a valued part of a team. Successful men may be able to count on that in a way that successful women cannot. And why should anyone want to be a loner even if they are at the top?

Such research shows us that the persistence of stereotypes cannot simply be shattered by personal force of will; even if a woman trains herself to act just as a man would in her position, she may not be able to resist the force of expectations that consign her to a different role. For instance, women are often told that their low pay relative to men’s is their own fault: they don’t ask for higher pay often enough. It is true that women do not ask for higher pay as much as men do. As the researchers Linda Babcock and Sara Laschever explained in 2003, when they
looked at a cohort of graduates from Carnegie Mellon University, they found that only 7 per cent of female students attempted to negotiate their initial salary offers compared to 57 per cent of men. Those who negotiated gained on average 7.4 per cent on their initial offers.
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But this failure of women to negotiate successfully is not just about their own decisions, it is also about the expectations around them. In another striking study, Linda Babcock and her colleagues ran a number of tests in which groups of people were asked to evaluate – after viewing videotapes or transcripts of interviews – men and women who were applying for a fictitious job, half of whom tried to negotiate their salary and half of whom did not. Babcock found that: ‘Men were always less willing to work with a woman who had attempted to negotiate than with a woman who did not. They always preferred to work with a woman who stayed mum.’ So women’s reluctance to negotiate is actually based on an accurate view of how they might be treated. ‘This isn’t about fixing the woman,’ Babcock said. ‘It isn’t about telling women, you need self-confidence or training. They are responding to incentives within the social environment.’
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The researchers theorised that the persistence of masculine and feminine stereotypes encourages people to assume that resources should be allocated asymmetrically. This means that women can appear inappropriately demanding if they attempt to negotiate for more money. So women enter a loop in which they fail to negotiate, and they fall behind in status.

If we are honest about the ways in which women may be held back from seeking power, status and money not because of their innate desires or abilities, but because of the expectations in the culture around them, we begin to see again why it is important for us to look at how social factors still create inequality. We will never challenge the ways that women’s freedom is still constrained if we simply acquiesce in the idea that women are biologically programmed to fit in with the most limited stereotype of femininity.

The stereotype of the female carer

The search for greater equality does not just entail changes in women’s lives, and the existence of the backlash is not only holding women back from change. The narrative of biological determinism not only includes sweeping rhetoric about women’s lack of aptitude for high-intensity careers, but also moves into grand claims for men’s lack of aptitude for empathy. This stereotype can be seen to operate at a very early age, when little boys are expected to be aggressive and uninterested in social interaction. In later life it operates against men’s further movement into the domestic world, and is just as dangerous as the stereotype against authoritative women, because there can be no further progress towards equality unless men are prepared to do their fair share of home-making. A woman’s attempts to take a greater part in the world of paid work can so easily founder if there is nobody who will work with her to create a full and rewarding homelife. And as long as employers can assume that the typical worker is prepared to work any hours at any intensity while his wife picks up the slack at home, there will not be sufficient pressure to reshape the workplace in the way that is essential not just for greater equality, but also for greater happiness. Many women have written recently about their disillusionment with the notion that one can ‘have it all’, both a demanding job and a good home life. I agree that we should not be in thrall to the idea that paid work is all that gives life value. But the joys of family life are not just the responsibility of women, and it is strange to see how our culture seems to be retreating into the idea that men will never play a full part in creating those joys.

The stereotype that men are deficient in nurturing and empathising skills has been reinforced by some of those writers who rely on biological explanations for sex differences. In the view of some writers, the autistic man – a man who has a brain
development disorder which impairs social interaction and communication – is only an exaggerated example of a pattern characteristic of many men. ‘Extreme men, to be sure,’ says Susan Pinker, commenting on men with autism, ‘their profiles still illustrate a pattern that has been documented in average males.’
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This view of masculinity encourages us to forgive men their poor showing in family life and domestic work; it’s not just that they prefer the rewards of paid work, but that they are handicapped in the everyday skills required to create a satisfactory domestic environment.

We see examples of this stereotypical man, whose bumbling lack of social skills is in extreme contrast to the poise and capability of his girlfriend, everywhere in our culture, from the grunting men seen as typical of their sex in self-help books, to the perpetual adolescents we meet in popular films from
Knocked Up
to
The Break Up
. And the rise of this stereotype encourages a fatalistic attitude towards men’s underachievement at home. For instance, as one writer in the
Daily Mail
put it, while reviewing Louann Brizendine’s book on the female brain: ‘We blokes, struggling to live up to the template of “new men” who can be caring and empathetic, are apparently being forced to behave in a way for which we are simply not designed.’
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Such commentary may not always be entirely serious, but even so it often encourages a lazy acquiescence in the status quo. It is reinforced by the use of bad science by the media, as we saw in the last chapter. For instance, the BBC series
Secrets of the Sexes
highlighted an ‘experiment’ that showed that men responded less well to babies’ needs. They sent five women into a room with five babies, and asked them to change the babies’ nappies, and then five men to do the same task. The voiceover concluded that because the women were more likely to pick the baby up: ‘Men find emotional connection difficult.’ When one man did pick up the baby, we were told that this was not a natural response: ‘Lloyd is aware that he is not naturally empathic, so he
has made more of an effort.’
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There was no exploration of, for instance, what kind of experience any of the men and women had had with babies or whether they behaved the same way if they believed they were not being watched.

But other research has suggested that men can respond very much as women do to babies, especially if they are given the chance to spend time with children. As Adrienne Burgess has recorded in her study of men as parents,
Fatherhood Reclaimed
, when tapes of babies crying were played to boys and girls and their reactions were recorded, ‘Their social responses – whether they smiled or frowned – were different, with the girls on the whole showing greater concern. But when their concealed responses – their heart-rates, blood pressure and so on – were measured, there were no differences. Both sexes were reacting with the same degree of disquiet.’ Similarly, if new fathers are left alone with their babies, they are just as deft, just as responsive, and just as able, if blindfolded, to recognise their babies by the shape of their hands.
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The fact that the biological ability to bear children has been given only to one sex does not necessarily mean a biological gift for caring has been similarly unequally distributed. The narrative of biological determinism is often intensely idealistic about women’s natural bond with their children. But let’s be honest: although they are biologically fit for bearing children, not all women slip entirely easily into caring for them. Women learn to care, and for some of them that entails a real struggle. Although women often keep this struggle to themselves, sometimes their frustrations, and their desire to have their male partner alongside them in the struggle rather than pushed out to work, can be clearly heard. On one thread in 2008 on the parenting website Mumsnet, women remembered their feelings when their partners went back to work. ‘I very clearly remember that in the early days, when he left the house I had an incredible urge to open the door and run up the street screaming “PLEASE DON’T LEAVE
ME WITH THE BABY!”’; ‘I also had that horrible dread when he was leaving for work that “I just can’t do it, don’t go”’; ‘I used to be so jealous of my husband swanning off to work with not a care in the world whilst I was stuck at home with a colicky, refluxy baby who wouldn’t stop screaming’; ‘I even used to watch neighbours pootling off in their cars and feel envious of them going about their day to day business’; ‘I used to find that by 5pm I was at breaking point. I remember one night calling him on his bus journey home (15 min journey) several times, demanding “where is the bus now”. And even meeting the bus so that I could hand my daughter over!’
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In the past feminists have often explored these struggles and frustrations – not in order to downgrade the work of caring, but in order to show that what looks natural may in fact be the product of a great effort. For instance, Naomi Wolf in
Misconceptions
laid bare the ways in which women may feel often unsuited to mothering, even when they are determined to be good mothers. There is a telling scene in this book, where a friend of hers remembers how she was playing with her baby son, sorting cubes, for ‘what seemed to me to be a really long period of time. Ed came in, saw this scene and said, “Oh, you’re just entranced.” And I said, “Are you out of your mind? I’m bored silly.” And he was stunned – he had no idea.’
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I see this ‘Ed’ over and over again in men who look at women behaving in a certain way and assume that the behaviour is utterly natural, without bothering to imagine the other desires or frustrations that may lie beneath that behaviour. Once I talked to a senior editor at a national newspaper about why there are so few women in senior editorial roles, and so many very young women in junior roles at newspapers. This successful, hugely confident, well-paid man, who also happened to be a divorced father who rarely saw his children, told me that most women simply didn’t want to continue their careers in their thirties because what they really wanted was to stay home with their
children. ‘That’s what they want!’ he laughed. ‘You see them come in, all fresh and keen, and then ten years later they are telling you they’re off to look after their kids. But that’s what they want – you can’t stop it. It’s nature.’ I have talked to dozens of women over the years who have done exactly that – started a career with great verve and commitment, and then moved away from it once they have started a family – and what I have heard, alongside the pleasures of their changing lives, is also a great deal of frustration and anger, about the impossibility of setting up part-time work in the field they loved or the difficulties they had in getting their husbands to take on a fair share of the childcare. The new fashion for biological determinism encourages us to see as natural a division of labour between men and women that could otherwise be challenged.