Women Have Higher Standards
Perhaps the most interesting finding from sociologist Shelley Correll's study (introduced in yesterday's post) is that when men and women were told that men were better at a fictitious skill, women and men held different standards for what constituted high ability at that skill.
In the group that was told that men were more likely to have "contrast sensitivity ability," women believed they had to earn a score of at least 89 percent to be successful, but men felt that a minimum score of 79 percent was sufficient to be successful - a difference of 10 percentage points!
In the group that was told that there were no gender differences in "contrast sensitivity ability," women and men had much more similar ideas about how high their scores would have to be to think that they were good at the task: Women said they would need to score 82 percent, while men said they would need to score 83 percent.
This finding suggests that women hold themselves to a higher standard than their male peers do in "masculine" fields like science and engineering. The result is that fewer women than men of equal ability assess themselves as being good at math and science and aspire to science and engineering careers.
Does this research ring true to you? Have you noticed that women tend to believe that they must be exceptional to be successful in science?
Interesting comments. I agree with Susan and Hmcbride that women may be accurately gauging how good they have to be in "male" fields (i.e. better than their male colleagues need to be) to succeed. Amy, just to clarify, I (Christi Corbett from AAUW) am writing the posts this week in place of Laura. And in response to your comment, I don't intend to pathologize the women, just to demonstrate that women appear to hold themselves to a higher standard than men do in fields considered to be masculine. The title could be "Men have lower standards". I like your point about women correcting for men's self-promotional tactics.
Again, Laura, this seems unnecessarily slow, given our daily interactions with men.
Of course they're going to set standards low and then crow about their prowess. How else are they going to big themselves up, demand jobs, get mates? You can see this behavior in 3-year-old boys, for crying out loud; arrant baloney is the order of the day, so long as it gets them what they're after.
I really don't think this has anything to do with women's believing they have to be exceptional. Please, it's so unnecessary to pathologize the women. It does mean, though, that if we're going to have fair hiring, we need to be willing and able to correct for the men's self-promotional tactics.
I agree with Susan. I do have a problem telling young women that they don't have to be better than a man at their same level to be considered equivalent because that's reality. The Sweden study results affected me profoundly. It confirmed what many women at my career stage had long suspected. And it certainly didn't make us ready to charge into faculty positions to fight the good fight.
Sometimes I think NOT telling young women anything about how productive they need to be is better than telling them anything at all. At least then you haven't biased them one way or another.
Often women DO have to be better than men, unfortunately. Remember the study from Sweden (which ought to give pause as the Swedes are noted for equality) which found that female candidates for a postdoc fellowship had to have on average about 2.5x better publications than the men to be ranked equivalently.
(More examples in this Michelle Francl's recent article:
http://www.nature.com/nchem/journal/v3/n9/full/nchem.1106.html)
I remember being told in freshman chemistry lab that the best students would be the men. To me, it was a challenge to disprove that, but I know many of my female classmates were discouraged with a "why bother?"
I remember realizing as a young faculty member that even though I was publishing steadily, I never got the meeting invitations that went to a male peer in my field, who gave the same talk for years in a row and was less productive. But he got the awards and the invitations.
And while those events were years ago, now, I'm not confident it has changed.
