The folks over at FiveThirtyEight got together last week to ponder the question, “Do You Have To Be Manly To Be President?” And while they did not appear to reach a definitive conclusion, the discussion was very interesting for a couple of reasons (as in how significant is the size of a man’s hands in determining his ability to occupy the Oval Office).
From Clare Malone, a senior political writer for FiveThirtyEight:
We’ve all been conditioned in certain ways — and even if you’re down with feminism and up on the correct way to address changing gender norms, if you were born in a certain year (let’s say pre-1995), you have some pretty ingrained bias you might never get rid of. Those Snapchatting younger millennials, now, they might be a different story when it comes to perceptions of candidates in elections to come over the next decades.
It is simply assumed that millennials will not have the ingrained bias that is shared by older generations. That was my assumption as well. The conditioning of my youth is different from what they were exposed to, so their bias should be different as well.
But it really doesn’t appear to be working out that way. At least, not completely.
Leah Libresco, a news writer for FiveThirtyEight, introduced into the conversation her “all-time favorite natural experiment” which was conducted in India. Perceptions of Female Leaders in India tried to determine if exposure to women in leadership roles impacted the perceptions of women’s abilities. They reserved a number of village council membership positions, allowing only female candidates to run for those seats, on a random basis among 495 villages in India.
In villages that did not have council memberships reserved for female candidates ...
… both genders exhibited an explicit preference for male leaders. Male villagers in never-reserved villages rated male leaders 1.45 points higher than female leaders on a ten-point scale. Among female villagers the difference was smaller (0.56 points), but still significant.
Even women thought that men could do a better job. As for those in the villages that had seats reserved for women candidates, there was still an explicit belief that men could do a better job as leaders. However, perceptions of women’s competence increased in those villages after a single cycle with women on the council. After two cycles of women in leadership roles, the women did statistically better in open elections. Apparently, seeing is believing.
Here in the States, gender bias appears to manifest as early as middle school. A recent Harvard study looked at biases related to gender and leadership. The researchers conducted several surveys, focus groups, and informal interviews with almost 20,000 students at 59 different middle and high schools.
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When asked who is more effective in specific professions, almost a quarter of teen girls—23%— preferred male over female political leaders while only 8% of girls preferred female political leaders, with 69% reporting no difference in preference.
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Forty-percent of teen boys preferred male over female political leaders while only 4% preferred female political leaders with 56% expressing no preference. A higher percentage of boys preferred male business leaders (36%) to female leaders (6%). There was no significant difference between girls’ preference for male versus female business leaders.
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Both boys and girls preferred females by large margins in traditionally female professions, e.g., as child care directors and arts program directors.
The full report is available here.
The pattern appears to continue at the college level, at least in the STEM fields. Anthropologist Daniel Grunspan and his colleagues at the University of Washington asked 1,700 biology students to rank how they viewed the course work knowledge of their fellow classmates. The men underestimated the academic performance of the women in their classes.
Results reveal that males are more likely than females to be named by peers as being knowledgeable about the course content. This effect increases as the term progresses, and persists even after controlling for class performance and outspokenness. The bias in nominations is specifically due to males over-nominating their male peers relative to their performance. The over-nomination of male peers is commensurate with an overestimation of male grades by 0.57 points on a 4 point grade scale, indicating a strong male bias among males when assessing their classmates.
Females, in contrast, nominated equitably based on student performance rather than gender, suggesting they lacked gender biases in filling out these surveys. These trends persist across eleven surveys taken in three different iterations of the same Biology course. In every class, the most renowned students are always male. This favoring of males by peers could influence student self-confidence, and thus persistence in this STEM discipline.
It is all about perception, and not necessarily ability. So why does this perception that women are not as capable as men still persist? Especially among the millennials? It doesn’t make a lot of sense that growing up during the ‘90s they would have assimilated the old cultural stereotypes of earlier generations, making them less willing to trust the abilities of women outside of the traditional caregiving roles.
Might it have something to do with how our culture still portrays women?
Two linguistic researchers, Professor Carmen Fought of Pitzer College, and Karen Eisenhauer, a graduate student at North Carolina State, analyzed the dialogue in a dozen Disney princess films. According to the two researchers, studies have shown that children use animated films in constructing their gender identities. They looked at animated films covering three distinct eras:
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The Classics are those films that the boomer generation would have grown up with: Snow White (1937), Cinderella (1950), and Sleeping Beauty (1959)
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The Renaissance films are those familiar to the millennials: The Little Mermaid (1989), Beauty and the Beast (1991), Aladdin (1992), Pocahontas (1995), and Mulan (1998)
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The New Age films were created in the 21st century: The Princess and the Frog (2009), Tangled (2010), Brave (2012), and Frozen (2013)
They found that the women characters in the Classics were complimented on their appearance 55 percent of the time and their skills only 11 percent of the time. For the Renaissance it was a little better, appearance was complimented 38 percent of the time and skills 23 percent of the time. It is only in the New Age films that real progress has been made, and that women were complimented on their appearance only 22 percent of the time and their skills 40 percent of the time.
Interestingly, the women in the Classic films were allowed a greater share of dialogue than were those of the Renaissance films: In Snow White, dialogue was evenly divided between men and women, Cinderella was 60 percent female and 40 percent male, and Sleeping Beauty was 71 percent to 29. By the time the ‘90s Renaissance era rolled around, women’s voices were almost stilled, only getting 32 percent in The Little Mermaid, 29 percent in Beauty and the Beast, 10 percent in Aladdin, 24 percent in Pocahontas and 23 percent in Mulan. By the turn of the century things were improving in the New Age, with women claiming 24 percent of the dialogue in Princess and the Frog, 52 percent in Tangled, 74 percent in Brave, and 41 percent in Frozen.
These results were also seen in a study by Hanah Anderson and Matt Daniels, of Polygraph. They analyzed 30 Disney films, and found that males dominated in 22 of them. In five of the films the dialogue was fairly well balanced, and in only four, females had more than 60 percent of the dialogue. These Disney films included movies like Up, Toy Story, Monsters, Inc, Cars 2, The Lion King, Finding Nemo, and Hercules.
Including the Disney films, the two read more than 2,000 screenplays and found that:
Overall, a woman ended up having the most dialogue (i.e., being the lead) in 22 percent of the films they looked at. In about a third of the films, a woman was in second-place in terms of having the most dialogue. And only in about 18 percent of films did women occupy at least two of the top three speaking roles. In contrast, men occupied at least two of the top three speaking roles in 82 percent of films.
Fortunately, feminism is enjoying a resurgence, a fourth wave facilitated by social media and internet sites like Feminist.com. The fact that we still have a long way to go is best illustrated by Soraya Chemaly, writing for Role Reboot:
In the United States, white men make up more than 80% of Congress, 78% of state political executives, 75% of state legislators, 84% of mayors of the top 100 cities, 85% of corporate executive officers, 100% of CEOs of Wall Street firms, 95% of Fortune 500 CEOs, 73% of tenured professors, 64% of newsroom staffers, 97% of heads of venture capital firms, 90% of tech jobs in Silicon Valley, 97% of owners of television and radio licenses, 87% of police departments and 68% of U.S. Circuit Court Judges. Men have been 100% of our Presidents. If I wrote this list as a novel in which the genders were reversed, reviewers would describe this world as a violent and emasculating feminist tyranny or a frightening male dystopia.
(As of 2016, men make up 75 percent of state political executives, and 81 percent of mayors of the top 100 cities.)