Science role models who are too feminine are discouraging — because there’s a perception that it’s too hard to be both pretty and sciencey?
Maybe we need to change the perception, rather than asking women representing science to try and dress down.
Pharyngula
Evolution, development, and random biological ejaculations from a godless liberal
I don’t actually understand that. It seems like the “feminine” scientist would demonstrate that they can be both pretty and sciency.
I know when I decided to go into science, my mother was worried I might be a lesbian. It didn’t help (for her) that I never wear pink and rarely wear high heels, dresses, etc.
Why is “wearing dark clothes, likes reading” described as different from being “feminine”? Maybe that’s the problem right there.
iknlast
I’m wondering about the “feminine role model” picture as well. Did they do the usual photo-shopped glamour shot?
So women who are already into science know that one can be sciency no matter how one dresses or presents oneself or what one’s other interests are – possibly because what they know from their own experience or from the peers they hang out with. But at least a large fraction of women who decided on other career paths have some kind of prejudice that performed femininity as understood in their culture and science are mutually exclusive, regardless of counter-examples?
I wonder what sort of results you’d get comparing male science role models who looked a little disheveled to ones who looked like they spent a lot of effort to look good.
Or maybe girls simply find it off putting when they are reminded that society judges them primarily by their conformity to gender norms, regardless of their talents or passions.
My daughter dislikes femininity and heads firmly in the opposite direction when she sees any. Actually, she dislikes masculinity too. I think if you’re choosing someone specifically to encourage girls into science, a relatively neutral persona may be best. It’s not that there’s anything wrong with femininity, for those who are into it, but many girls experience it as an unwanted pressure to be something they’re not.
As I understand the study authors’ argument, these girls (the ones disengaged from STEM) don’t think it’s completely impossible to be pretty and sciency–they just think that it’s very, very difficult. When they look at an “unfeminine” female scientist, they see a normal woman who has sacrificed some of her femininity to excel at STEM, and they believe that they could attain the same success by the same route if they chose. But when the same girls look at a “feminine” scientist, they see a superwoman who’s managed to be both pretty and sciency because she’s a superwoman, and they don’t believe that “normal” girls like themselves could follow in her footsteps.
Reading about the “feminine” scientist makes them think that female scientists are a breed of exceptionally awesome superwomen, and the girls don’t believe that they could ever measure up to that standard.
Sorry for the redundancy, thought I’d trimmed that last paragraph.
I too wonder at the complete association here between “femininity” and “wearing pink clothes, interested in fashion”. It’s a simple and crass shorthand in many modern cultures, sure, but it doesn’t encapsulate a lot of other things we traditionally code as “feminine”.
Following fashion IS demonstrably time-consuming, expensive, materialistic and viewed through a competitive lens in modern cultures. A lot of people of all genders are put off if reminded explicitly that they might be expected to devote energy to a whole additional world of display, competition and performance as well as doing everything else they want to do. If that’s the thing about “femininity” that you’re reminding these girls of when priming them for the questionnaire then this kind of result might be expected.
Would the experiment produce the same results if the variable for “femininity” were one which wasn’t overtly time- and effort-requiring, such as having a nurturing personality or not being competitive and aggressive? If both scientists were dressed the same but one’s interests included looking after animals while the other’s included playing football, would that have the same result? Is it femininity in general or just one obviously onerous aspect of it that they are reacting to?
Also, there has been lots of social science / anthropology / psychology research done on the whole concept of “role models” and how different cultures and groups relate to them. The idea of a “role model” is not a simple or straightforward cultural universal – the degree to which one has heroes at all, who one chooses to emulate, what about those heroes one emulates oneself, and how much one rates one’s self worth in comparison with one’s heroes varies considerably. In order to justify the theory that this is about feeling that keeping two plates spinning – science and prettiness – would be too much of a burden, it would be a good idea to find out whether this is the sort of thinking that girls from this cultural group generally engage in in the first place.
I wonder if it’s something like “Oh, yeah, you can be sciency, but you’ll still be expected to be pretty and feminine,” while the other makes clear that, no, you don’t have to be.
Heh, it always amazes me how defensive I get about some things and then realize that I’m reacting viscerally to being told that somehow my liking of pink contrasts with my liking of computers, that founding a women’s group at my male-heavy alma mater means I don’t like men. I like science just fine, I’ve never excelled at it, or had a particular interest, I read about it, but don’t go exploring on my own. I’ve always excelled at math, I was the only freshman in AP Calculus in high school, I placed out of math so many times….I know I’m good at it, but it wasn’t something I was interested in as a career, so I did something I actually *am* interested in. My computer skills and math skills are considered an awesome bonus, usually, at work. The hardest thing is toeing the line, can I wear a skirt suit to this meeting, or go for the pants suit and be safe? Is this one of the meetings where all of the dudes are super clueless, or will the women be allowed to talk sometimes? Will someone get pissed off if I point out that the men aren’t letting the women talk?
cartomancer
Why do you wonder?
It’s the way femininity is constructed, it’s the way dominant discourse runs.
I think that feminists often make two mistakes:
First, they point out that there’s actually no set in stone genetic link between pink and women, fashion and women, caring and nurturing and women. We’re good that far. And then they run with it and act as if there was no heavily enforced cultural link even though they’re actually working against that very stereotype. Yes, gender works. Perfomativity works.
The second one is the acceptance of masculine supremacy and “neutrality”. In my experience there are very few things that are actually neutral. I don’T know, eating pizza maybe. But it’s always the female coded thing that is marked and when people talk about “neutral” they actually mean “male”. Pants are neutral clothing, skirts are for girls…
Worthwhile research, I suppose, but a picture is not always worth a thousand words. If every school had visits from women in science, and the kids were able to ask questions, that’d help dispel preconceptions about ladyscience.
Stereotype threat, perhaps?
My bad-science sense is tingling. So many questions about methodology. Off to read the paper (as usual, it is available in non-paywalled form on the author’s site at U. Mich.)
Well that’s disappointing. The paper has no links to supplemental materials, so the closest we get to a description of what they mean by “feminine” is
Also, the self-identification as being STEM-oriented or not was done after reading the article and answering about role model positivity and their own future plans. It’s not immediately obvious to me how that affects the outcome, but (speaking as a non-psychologist) it seems like more priming than you’d want in your study.
Also also, for the STEM-identified participants, the effect on future plans was not significant (see Fig. 1 in the paper). The significant effect only occurred for girls who described themselves as not interested in STEM fields (again, after answering the other questions).
Finally, the conclusion that this is an effect of unreachable expectations (of success in both STEM and femininity) is hardly supported by the data. Off the top of my head, my first hypothesis would be that by age 11 these girls (especially the group that identifies as not interested in STEM) have already internalized the “feminine != STEM” tropes, in which case seeing a feminine STEM role model is likely to cause cognitive dissonance. This is not discussed in the paper, and I see no way to eliminate this given the data. Indeed, the fact that only non-STEM-identified participants were affected this way seems consistent with this interpretation.
So, interesting work, but I think the authors are overinterpreting the results. And it’s most unfortunate that the actual test articles aren’t available. Isn’t that sort of thing generally posted as supplemental material?
#14
I’m not sure I was very clear. When I said “I wonder at the complete identification of pink, likes fashion with femininity”, I wasn’t saying I don’t understand that it is a commonly understood stereotype in many modern cultures, or that it doesn’t affect people’s thinking. I was saying that it is perhaps going too far to assume that the off-putting effect identified in this study is association with femininity in general, rather than association with this one specific aspect of what is coded as feminine.
The explanation put forward by the researcher is that it has something to do with creating an impression that being feminine while being a scientist is too much hard work. If that’s true then I wonder whether that impression comes primarily from an ingrained cultural sense that being feminine is additional hard work or from the fact that the femininity marker the participants were primed with was one which obviously is additional hard work. Hence I suggested a further experiment that used a different shorthand for “feminine”, but one which wasn’t overtly about doing things that take up lots of extra time and effort. That would still harness the intrinsic cultural assumptions about femininity, but it wouldn’t directly remind them that one of those assumptions involved lots of extra effort.
Giliell @ 14:
Yes. The default always being male is heavily internalized, too, by everyone.
So, the thing about perceptions of gender is–
waitwaitwait
6 October?
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I’d need to check my copy of Delusion of Gender, but I think it works something like this:
Girls get reminded of stereotypically feminine things like make-up or fancy clothes, that subconsciously brings them closer to a whole other bunch of stereotypically feminine things like being bad at science or not being supposed to like science because it’s a male thing… and as a result more of them figure they aren’t interested in science after all. They get into a stereotypically feminine frame of mind if you will.
Here’s the study. I’d be very interested to see whether it could be replicated. It’s also subject to standard critiques about using priming studies to make broader claims.
Has anybody asked them?
I’m always leery of people who are not in some less privileged group studying and speculating and theorizing about that group without getting input from members of that group. E.g., men talking about women, cis people talking about trans people.
At least we can conclude one thing: Just making it pink doesn’t work…
I think part of the problem is that what we really need is VOLUME — lots and lots and lots of exposures to MANY DIFFERENT women doing many different sciencey things. Any one woman who’s expected to be The Woman Doing Science We See Today is going to look wrong somehow.
How about showing the girls one of the several articles about the Homo naledi discovery, with the group photo of six women scientists, all happy and excited at being a part of a huge discovery? Who had, as a team, accomplished something that the available men scientists couldn’t?
That was an inspiring example for a girl to look at. More of this, please!
quoth Jacob Schmidt: “Oh, yeah, you can be sciency, but you’ll still be expected to be pretty and feminine,”
As a teenager, I was socially inept and never “properly dressed” (best I could do was hope to fit in enough to not be bullied most of the time). I was a geek/nerd into science and math and computers and electronics. The idea that I could build a meaningful life with a career in STEM and be judged on my brain and not my appearance was like a lifeline for me. I think I would have found it quite discouraging to be presented with role model of female scientists who dressed to the nines and were into reading about fashion – what hope would there be for me to ever fit in?
Not that there’s anything *wrong* with a person (of whatever gender) being into fashion, if that’s what interests them, but I’d make a plea to consider it orthogonal to interest in science – let’s just include that as part of the diversity we want to show when presenting examples of women in STEM.
@8 Aton Mates
I apologize for the long blockquote, but it is relAvent to something else I read and I cannot remember the source :/
Anyways, at a school with at risk African American kids, the school brought in a successful, former student who made it big in technology. The former student was an entrepreneur and the school, and the former student, wanted to show the kids that they, too, were not lost. The former student did this amazing presentation – from what I read – over the top amazing. Overheard on leaving a students were remarking ,”Man, I can never be like that”..
Effectively ruining the message :/
It doesn’t seem that contradictory, really – isn’t it just “ordinary” stereotype threat inasmuch as the more you’re reminded of the mere fact that you’re a girl (by the visible presence of coded-female cues), the less confident you tend to feel about achieving in any coded-male activity? :-(
Though the idea that it’s just that bit more daunting to be presented with a “superwoman” image, as others have pointed out, seems all too plausible too.
I do not find it counterintuitive at all. I am a male, so I cannot comment from female perspective at all. But due to health problems I never was into sports and I especially suck at basketball. And I still remember how discouraged I was when in higschool our gym teacher repeatedly told me that basketball is “university sport” (at the time the iron curtain fell and many people were enamored with everything American) and that I will not fit in if I am lousy at it. I went to university anyway and I learned there that he was talking out of his ass (the nonsense he told us does not even conform to any cultural stereotypes I know of), but I still remember how disheartening it was to think at the age of fifteen “so I am expected to be intelligent AND excellent at sports”?