Delusions of Gender

Today we had a graduate training seminar about gender equality in academia in the UK. As usual in these talks we saw the ever-depressing stats of how, as you go from GCSEs through degrees to academic positions the sex ratio goes from around 50:50 males:female in GCSE to ratios as extreme as 95:5 at professorship-level in cases like Physics.

Whilst such stats aren't so bad for subjects like Biology the issue is still present.

In the seminar today some interesting questions were asked:

-Do fewer females give invited talks at conferences than males?

-Do fewer females apply for fellowships/jobs than males?

And as you may expect, yes the data suggests that these are both indeed the case.

HOWEVER, on closer inspection it turns out that fewer females give invited talks at conferences because females actually turn down the invitation more than males.

Research ALSO suggests that most females only apply to fellowships/jobs when they meet 100% of the criteria, whilst males apply when they meet only a proportion of the criteria.

Clearly females are selling themselves short. It appears that a lot of biases in gender we see may largely be down to confidence and how individuals see themselves.

In the third year of my undergraduate at the University of Oxford one of my tutors gave me a book called 'Delusions of Gender' by Cordelia Fine.

This book is brilliant and delves into the research surrounding gender differences. It is written in a non-bias manner and I highly recommend reading it.

What sticks in my memory the most about this book is one study where males and females sat a maths test whereby some groups were told "males usually perform better on these tests than females" whilst others were not told a thing before they entered the exam. Shockingly, the study found that females did much worse than males in the groups which were primed with this fact than the females in unprimed groups.

So just BEING TOLD that males perform better than females in a test results in males performing better than females in that test.

Food for thought.

This exact study was brought up in the seminar today. Clearly individuals, however subconsciously, accept (at least to some degree) the information given to them that describes their gender. This means that information in the media we see on a daily basis is a powerful tool in shaping how we feel about ourselves,

So what can we do? People can't just automatically become more confident. That's like telling a sad person to be happy. But by identifying the sources that shape confidence, say, in the media, we could figure out what changes need to be made to remove gender-bias issues in confidence.

Today I learnt that people apply for jobs that they aren't 100% qualified for. So I might just apply to a job I'm not fully qualified for....

http://www.cordeliafine.com/delusions_of_gender.html