Gender Mosaic by Daphna Joel

Author:Daphna Joel
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
Published: 2019-09-16T16:00:00+00:00

16.

Binary

Brainwashing

When I submitted my very first scientific manuscript for publication in the mid-1990s—together with Ina Weiner, my PhD adviser—we used our initials instead of our full first names. It was a provocative paper; we challenged the then dominant view about the way the frontal lobes are connected with the basal ganglia, a group of deep-seated neuronal clusters underneath the cortex. We were concerned that if the reviewers knew we were women, our chances of publishing this manuscript would be nil. I don’t know if the initials helped, but the paper did get published, in the journal Neuroscience,1 and became one of several that changed the dogma.

Call us paranoid, but I later learned that at least we had been in good company. It turns out that at around the time we’d submitted our controversial paper, the author Joanne Rowling had adopted the initials “J K” as a pen name at the request of her publisher, who feared boys might not read a book written by a woman.

In case you think the latent bias against women has since vanished, a study published in 2012 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, USA, showed to what extent it hadn’t. Yale University researchers obtained feedback from 127 professors in biology, chemistry, and physics from several universities across the United States who had been asked to evaluate the credentials of a fictitious student supposedly applying for the position of lab manager.2 All the professors, who were unaware they were taking part in an experiment, received the same application. There was only one difference: in about half of the cases, the applicant’s first name was stated as John; in the other half, it was Jennifer. You may have guessed who fared better. The professors rated John as significantly more competent and hirable than Jennifer and suggested granting him a higher starting salary, of about $30,000 on average, compared with about $26,500 for Jennifer.

Interestingly, female faculty members were just as likely as their male colleagues to favor John—in line with other studies, showing that women are often no less gender-biased than men. And it wasn’t a matter of hostility toward women, just the opposite: the professors reported liking Jennifer more than John. Study authors suggest the bias was probably “unintentional, generated from widespread cultural stereotypes rather than a conscious intention to harm women.”

Even if unintentional, such biases produce their toxic results. They affect every aspect of a woman’s career—from her choice of studies to her chances of getting a job, the salary she will earn, and her prospects of being promoted.

It’s not always easy to spot how and when gender channeling takes root, but people, it turns out, already treat babies differently by gender in the crib. In one study, researchers at City University of New York conducted what they called a “baby X” experiment: they dressed a three-month-old baby in a gender-neutral yellow jumpsuit and observed how adult volunteers interacted with the infant.3 The volunteers were told the purpose was to study infants’ responses to strangers, but the real object was to reveal their own gender biases, if any.

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