Tapsearch Com EditorWhat not to wear
August 15th 2007 22:39
***UPDATED***
Reason has an interesting piece, inspired by the controversy over Hillary Clinton's cleavage, about the stereotypes people hold about women.
The piece argues:
True enough. Experiments do show that stereotypes can make us judge competent people poorly. (This applies to race as well, and you can read my American Spectator letter to the editor about that here.)
However, Reason goes on to miss the fact that many stereotypes, while they hurt the innocent, are true in terms of demographic trends. Test after test has shown that women and men have different abilities, and even when they have the same mean ability (say, IQ) the talent is distributed differently. It's not fair to assume an individual woman will have this-or-that level of ability, but if that assumption tends to be accurate, a lot of people will persist in it.
The article glosses over that fact with this statement:
The implicit argument here is that women are as competent as men are, but unfortunately people can't see that, so women seek out careers where stereotypes can't hurt them. They go places where only their ability counts.
The problem is that no, they don't. The cited fields are only 51 and 49 percent female, respectively. This compares to graduate students, 55-58 percent of whom are women, and to undergraduate students, 56 percent of whom are women. 44-47 percent of professional students are women. The total U.S. population is 51 percent female.
Also, law isn't all that objective to begin with: There's a lot of subjectivity in grading a paper, and lawyers' performances often depend on how well they can convey a commanding presence (or "signal competence").
And a quick look at the numbers on undergraduate enrollment further sinks this theory. The American Association of University Women provides them, and here's a list of fields with more than 50 percent male enrollment. They're listed from the most to least male-dominated:
Engineering
Mathematics and physical sciences
History
Business and management
The two most male-dominated are the two most objective fields: The students, by and large, receive problems and solve them. If they get the right answer, they pass.
And here are the female majors, from most to least female-dominated:
Education
Psychology
Health professions
Public affairs/social services
Humanities
Other
Biological sciences
Social science
With the exception of biology, women are "flocking" to pretty soft sciences, where subjectivity reigns. Maybe their natural abilities work best here, or maybe discrimination really does put them here, but they most certainly are not seeking out the most direct tests of ability.
UPDATE: Kerry Howley, the piece's author, has a great response to this post in the comments. Please read it if you're interested in this debate, and thanks to her for reading and posting in such detail. (Bigtime thanks also, Kerry, for linking to that baseball study; I've been looking for something just like that for a piece I'm working on.)
She has an excellent point, one I overlooked, about the objectivity of law: The bar. People take the exam, and regardless of which gender box they check, they get a license to practice. From a quick Google search, they seem to score comparably (one analysis found but a .162 standard deviation gap in favor of men). She's also right that " Not every field where competence is easily signaled needs to be majority women to make the point."
(For the record, what I mean by "objective" is a field where instructors, employers and clients have little leeway in judging one's performance. For example, a math problem or a bar exam question is right or wrong, but a humanities paper could be a 7/10 or an 8/10 depending on the preferences and stereotypes of the grader. I presume this is pretty much what Kerry means by competence being "easily signaled," and I wish I'd made that clearer. As an aside, one interesting way to test for objectivity would be to figure out the standard deviations of individuals' grades -- math students probably get similar marks from class to class, where teachers in more subjective majors probably grade the same students differently. But I digress.)
Anyway, I'd like to reiterate two things from the original post. One, women are not "flocking" to law; they're merely about evenly represented. What's more, the fields in which they are overrepresented don't have bar exams or anything like them (that's the significance of listing majority-female college majors).
And two, not every objective/easily-competence-s ignaled field needs to be majority-female for Kerry's point to be correct -- but that should be true disproportionately. As the list of majors shows, the opposite is pretty much the case.
Math and engineering may not have single standardized tests that completely determine one's standing, but they're a heck of a lot more objective-test-based than, say, education, where professors subjectively grade papers/classroom teaching performance instead of checking right vs. wrong answers. (A close friend of mine, for example, frequently complains about her education papers' grades.) Men concentrate in fields of right and wrong answers like math and science, while women study more subjective areas like education, psychology, humanities, etc.
Finally, I certainly never said that high female enrollment in education schools suggests that stereotypes don't exist. I would never say stereotypes don't exist, because I believe lots of them! What I said is that the trend indicates women aren't gravitating toward fields where their performances are most objectively judged.
Maybe this reflects women's natural or learned abilities (men outscore women on visuospatial IQ measures, the opposite is true for verbal ones, and verbal fields are more subjective), and maybe it has to do with discrimination in certain fields. Probably both, because real differences between groups are often exaggerated when the general population notices and starts acting on them. But my point is that women are in those fields, not in hyper-objective ones where stereotypes can't hurt them.
Reason has an interesting piece, inspired by the controversy over Hillary Clinton's cleavage, about the stereotypes people hold about women.
The piece argues:
Lacking a Y chromosome almost certainly puts half the population at a disadvantage in the quest to signal competence and authority. Women are repeatedly judged as having performed better in blind assessments of their abilities, from thesis papers to orchestra tryouts, than they are judged when their gender is revealed.
True enough. Experiments do show that stereotypes can make us judge competent people poorly. (This applies to race as well, and you can read my American Spectator letter to the editor about that here.)
However, Reason goes on to miss the fact that many stereotypes, while they hurt the innocent, are true in terms of demographic trends. Test after test has shown that women and men have different abilities, and even when they have the same mean ability (say, IQ) the talent is distributed differently. It's not fair to assume an individual woman will have this-or-that level of ability, but if that assumption tends to be accurate, a lot of people will persist in it.
The article glosses over that fact with this statement:
They respond by flocking to careers where competence is most directly signaled, like those in medicine and law.
The implicit argument here is that women are as competent as men are, but unfortunately people can't see that, so women seek out careers where stereotypes can't hurt them. They go places where only their ability counts.
The problem is that no, they don't. The cited fields are only 51 and 49 percent female, respectively. This compares to graduate students, 55-58 percent of whom are women, and to undergraduate students, 56 percent of whom are women. 44-47 percent of professional students are women. The total U.S. population is 51 percent female.
Also, law isn't all that objective to begin with: There's a lot of subjectivity in grading a paper, and lawyers' performances often depend on how well they can convey a commanding presence (or "signal competence").
And a quick look at the numbers on undergraduate enrollment further sinks this theory. The American Association of University Women provides them, and here's a list of fields with more than 50 percent male enrollment. They're listed from the most to least male-dominated:
Engineering
Mathematics and physical sciences
History
Business and management
The two most male-dominated are the two most objective fields: The students, by and large, receive problems and solve them. If they get the right answer, they pass.
And here are the female majors, from most to least female-dominated:
Education
Psychology
Health professions
Public affairs/social services
Humanities
Other
Biological sciences
Social science
With the exception of biology, women are "flocking" to pretty soft sciences, where subjectivity reigns. Maybe their natural abilities work best here, or maybe discrimination really does put them here, but they most certainly are not seeking out the most direct tests of ability.
UPDATE: Kerry Howley, the piece's author, has a great response to this post in the comments. Please read it if you're interested in this debate, and thanks to her for reading and posting in such detail. (Bigtime thanks also, Kerry, for linking to that baseball study; I've been looking for something just like that for a piece I'm working on.)
She has an excellent point, one I overlooked, about the objectivity of law: The bar. People take the exam, and regardless of which gender box they check, they get a license to practice. From a quick Google search, they seem to score comparably (one analysis found but a .162 standard deviation gap in favor of men). She's also right that " Not every field where competence is easily signaled needs to be majority women to make the point."
(For the record, what I mean by "objective" is a field where instructors, employers and clients have little leeway in judging one's performance. For example, a math problem or a bar exam question is right or wrong, but a humanities paper could be a 7/10 or an 8/10 depending on the preferences and stereotypes of the grader. I presume this is pretty much what Kerry means by competence being "easily signaled," and I wish I'd made that clearer. As an aside, one interesting way to test for objectivity would be to figure out the standard deviations of individuals' grades -- math students probably get similar marks from class to class, where teachers in more subjective majors probably grade the same students differently. But I digress.)
Anyway, I'd like to reiterate two things from the original post. One, women are not "flocking" to law; they're merely about evenly represented. What's more, the fields in which they are overrepresented don't have bar exams or anything like them (that's the significance of listing majority-female college majors).
And two, not every objective/easily-competence-s ignaled field needs to be majority-female for Kerry's point to be correct -- but that should be true disproportionately. As the list of majors shows, the opposite is pretty much the case.
Math and engineering may not have single standardized tests that completely determine one's standing, but they're a heck of a lot more objective-test-based than, say, education, where professors subjectively grade papers/classroom teaching performance instead of checking right vs. wrong answers. (A close friend of mine, for example, frequently complains about her education papers' grades.) Men concentrate in fields of right and wrong answers like math and science, while women study more subjective areas like education, psychology, humanities, etc.
Finally, I certainly never said that high female enrollment in education schools suggests that stereotypes don't exist. I would never say stereotypes don't exist, because I believe lots of them! What I said is that the trend indicates women aren't gravitating toward fields where their performances are most objectively judged.
Maybe this reflects women's natural or learned abilities (men outscore women on visuospatial IQ measures, the opposite is true for verbal ones, and verbal fields are more subjective), and maybe it has to do with discrimination in certain fields. Probably both, because real differences between groups are often exaggerated when the general population notices and starts acting on them. But my point is that women are in those fields, not in hyper-objective ones where stereotypes can't hurt them.
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Comment by Kerry Howley
The implicit argument here is that women are as competent as men are, but unfortunately people can't see that, so women seek out careers where stereotypes can't hurt them. They go places where only their ability counts.
Actually, that's not the argument at all. Competence is easily signaled in law not because law is an "objective" field (whatever that means) but because the Bar is objective. It's an easy field to break into. You go to school and pass a test. Signaling competence as a history professor or a business guru isn't so systematic. (As impressive as your MBA is, it's in no way equivalent to passing the bar in terms of securing a job.)
So your subjectivity/objectivity distinction is misplaced. (And I'll assume you're not seriously arguing that the fact women choose careers in education says something about a lack of stereotyping.)
Your point on maths and sciences is well taken. But while you and I probably disagree on the reasons that women shy away from these areas, I wouldn't say the core reasons have much to do with signaling deficits later in life. That women show less interest in engineering jobs can be true, and that women have difficulty signaling authority in various fields can also be true. In fact, I would expect there to be fewest women in traditionally masculine fields (perhaps "objective" by your standards) with no systematic measure of competence equivalent to the bar. Not every field where competence is easily signaled needs to be majority women to make the point.
I don't see how female majors are at all relevant; perhaps you can explain that. Nor does it make much sense to compare current grad students to those currently employed in various fields, given that the majorities in college enrollments have so recently shifted.
The thing to understand is that small biases can scale up to real structural barriers. Here's a great study that neatly exemplifies the point.