The Science of Everything Podcast - Episode 54: Sex and Gender Part 1

Episode Date: December 20, 2013

In this first of our two part series on sex and gender, I discuss the scientific evidence regarding some of the major behavioral and social differences between men and women, and examine the degree to which these can be explained by differential socialization and bias and discrimination. I also discuss the treatment of women in the workplace and how gender stereotypes serve to inhibit female advancement into higher positions.

You're listening to The Science of Everything podcast, episode 54, Sex and Gender, Part 1. In this double episode, we are going to talk about the differences between males and females, mostly looking at it from a perspective of different differences in behaviors and social outcomes. So we'll first discuss some of those differences, just from an observational standpoint, and then we'll try and present some of the sociological, psychological, and biological evidence. attempting to explain why these differences exist. And in particular, the focus will be on trying to distinguish between biological versus social influences of differing outcomes and behaviours, personalities, etc., between males and females.

So first, before we start looking at some differences, it's important to define the difference between the terms sex and gender, although the podcast is about both, in a sense. The focus is much more on gender, and I'll explain what I'm in. by that. So in sort of the way that people commonly speak, sex and gender are often used interchangeably, but particularly in social science, sociology in particular, sex and gender are quite generally distinguished from one another. So sex is used to refer to biological differences, so specifically reproductive organs, secondary sexual characteristics, X and Y chromosomes, that sort of thing. So It's just the purely biological and reproductive aspect of whether one is male or female,

and this applies to humans and animals as well. That's sex. Gender refers to the socially and culturally constructed roles, behaviors, and activities, and attributes that a given society considers to be masculine or feminine or appropriate for boys or girls or men or women. So this also relates to people's gender identity, whether they perceive themselves as being male or female. but it's distinguished from the purely biological aspect. So, for example, there are some people who, though biologically male or female, consider themselves to have the opposite gender identity,

and some of these people undergo various forms of surgery and hormone treatment to change sex. So in these transsexual individuals, their biological sex does not coincide with their gender identity. That's certainly a relatively rare phenomenon, but nonetheless, it's important to make this distinction between sex and gender because it helps us to understand the different causal factors behind the differences between males and females, and which of them actually relate to sex versus those that relate to gender. And as I said, the main focus of this series of episodes will be about gender as opposed to sex, but certainly we will discuss some biological aspects as well.

Okay, so that distinction being made, we will now move on to a very brief overview of some of the more obvious differences between males and females, with a focus on Western societies, particularly the United States, where most of this research has been done, but we will, to a small extent, engage in a cross-cultural analysis as well. So some of the more obvious differences between males and females, you could probably think of many of them yourself. So one important aspect is sex typing of work, so there are certain occupations which are considered things that men do, and there are certain occupations that are things that women do. So teaching and nursing are two very common examples of feminine-type occupations.

Masculine-type occupations would be many types of physical work, so, for example, firefighters or laborers. Also, politics is traditionally considered quite a masculine field, and still today, in almost all countries, there is a substantial under-representation of females in parliament, and also in top executive roles. military is also another area that's very masculine traditionally. Until very recently, education, particularly higher education, high school, university, especially was considered to be something that was only appropriate for males.

That's changed only in about the last hundred years in the West, but certainly historically that's been the case. Another important thing to be aware of is the pay gap, which you've probably heard before, that males earn more than females. There's an enormous literature on this, which we won't, really address too much in this series, but just a few points to make about it regarding the size of the pay gap. Well, first of all, the pay gap doesn't just exist in America. It exists in pretty much all countries, certainly all OECD countries, basically developed countries. And the size does vary

quite substantially between different countries. So at the low end, some countries like Poland and New Zealand and Denmark, the gender gap's only at 10%, but at the high end, say countries like Japan, it's It's upwards of 30%. US, I believe it's around 20-25-ish. It does depend on how you measure it, of course. So a sort of rough figure of 20-ish percent is a good ballpark if you're thinking sort of on average across developed countries. This is not accounted for by, for the most part, by differences in education,

so the gender pay gap prevails across different levels of education. There's a fairly large amount of controversy concerning the degree to which that the pay gap is generated by differences in skills and experience and other factors like that versus our discrimination. I think almost everyone agrees that at least some of the gender pay gap is accounted for by non-discriminatory components. So that would be differences in hours worked and differences in, as I said, experience and other things like that. The potential for pregnancy and maternity leave is also another factor which some have cited as being a reason

why employers are less willing to promote women and less willing to pay high salaries and things like that because of the additional costs those would potentially impose. But anyway, regardless, we won't say too much more about that specifically, but it's important to understand that the gender pay gap exists. It's quite large. It's existed for many decades. The size of it has diminished since the 50s and 60s, but it has not certainly gone away.

And some of the reasons for the gender pay gap, we will investigate later on, over these series of episodes. Some other important components. Obviously, there are differences in appearance between men and women. Now, some of these are related to sex, so women have uterus and different reproductive organs, different secondary sexual characteristics.

So that's facial hair on men and a higher ratio of muscles in males, things like that. Males, on average, slightly taller than females, slightly larger, factors like this. But also, so those are sex factors, but there are also many gender factors that affect the differences between males and females. So, for instance, in Western societies,

women are far more likely to have long hair than males. There is nothing at all biological about that. That's a cultural phenomenon. Women tend to wear dresses or skirts or other clothing like that. Men do not. Men wear suits. Women can wear suits, but, you know, much less likely to. So there are obviously many important differences there.

all, of course, completely social and cultural. There's obviously no biological component to those, so they're not directly anyway. There are personality differences. Men and women are definitely perceived to be different. Women are generally perceived to be more caring, more nurturing, less confrontational. Men are perceived to be more agentive, more aggressive, more active. And whether these stereotypes are borne out by the evidence is something we'll examine in due course, but I'm just sort of setting the stage for the types of differences we will attempt to explain. There are differences in conversation as well, so the types of things that men and women talk about and also interests. So obviously, you know, boys are supposed to be interested, well, are perceived to be or are generally thought to be more interested in sports and things like cars and other object sort of toys like that,

whereas girls are supposedly more interested in dolls and sort of nurturing-related play activities, things like that, and also more interested in makeup and personal appearance, as opposed to boys who are not so interested. There's also substantial differences in regard to the legal system, so, for example, the overwhelming majority of violent crime is committed by males, and the overwhelming majority of rape victims or sexual harassment victims in general are female. there are considerable differences there as well, and we'll talk about those a little bit as well in due course. So that concludes the broad outline of the type of differences that we're going to address. There are obviously many more aspects that I haven't discussed, and many of these things also differ between different cultures. So this episode would definitely have a Western, particularly American focus in last part,

because that's where most of the research that has been done. But many of the basic principles apply cross-culturally as best as we can determine. Another important fact to note is that basically all the societies that we know about, with maybe a few very minor exceptions, have been what we call patriarchal societies. That is societies dominated by males, where males occupy the dominant political and economic positions of power, and women are placed in, held in a subordinate position. Now, exactly the nature of that position differs a fair bit between societies. and I'm not just talking about societies that exist now. I'm also talking historically. So, for example, freedoms and position that women have in Western society today is, I think

most would agree, much greater than it was 100 or 200 years ago, but still many would argue that the society is patriarchal in the sense that most of the persons of power in politics and in business and indeed still in academia and other officers of high status and respect are males. and there still exist many norms, social norms and practices which serve to not necessarily exclude completely, but certainly direct women away from those places of power and status, and we'll address many of those in this series of episodes. So that's what we mean by patriarchal society, sort of male-dominated, and it certainly doesn't mean that it's dominated by all males versus all females. It's too simplistic.

But virtually all societies that are known are patriarchal in one form or other. So that's important to remember that there is certainly a large degree of cross-cultural similarity in the types of things we're attempting to explain here. Okay, so having set the basis for what we're going to look at, the first topic that we're going to discuss is socialization behaviors. Just to set the stage a bit, once we finish with socialization, I'll move on to talk about discrimination and bias more specifically, and then we'll move on to addressing some of the more biological aspects of, gender differences, including a look at hormones and their influence on behavior and interests and such, and other biological differences, for example, brain differences, differences in brain structure and function. And following that, we will address a number of more specific topics that I think are of interest, including occupational segregation, the presence or absence of women in math and stem fields,

which is a particularly controversial issue, the differences between male and female expression and experience of emotions and also differences in conversation between males and females. So we'll start off by looking at social influences, then the biological influences, and then we'll apply some of these broader insights to looking at those specific topics that I outlined. So starting with socialization. Socialization is, in my view, one of the most important, if not the most important, a broad category of influences that determine gender behaviors and gender identity. So what do we mean by socialization? socialization. Socialization is the process by which social customs and norms and cultural practices, etc., are transmitted from one generation to the next, essentially, within a particular society.

Another way of describing it is it's the means by which social and cultural continuity are maintained. Socialization has many different components, but, so for example, teaching children learning a language that parents speak and that their society speaks, that's part of socialization. Learning table matters is part of socialization. learning which side of the road to drive on, or what side of the path to walk down is part of socialisation. Learning to read and write is in some sense part of socialisation. So there's many, many components of socialisation. What we're going to focus on is particularly differential socialisation,

which refers to the process by which males and females are assigned different gender roles and are socialised differentially so that girls are socialised to behave like girls and ultimately women are supposed to behave. and boys are socialized, consistent with how boys and ultimately men are supposed to behave. So there's a difference in how boys and girls and then later men and women are socialized. If there wasn't such a difference, then it would just be socialization.

There would still be socialization, but there wouldn't be this difference in socialization between the two genders. So the argument here, which will be, I think, be illustrated by a vast body of evidence, which I'll illustrate some of, the basic argument is that differential socialization of boys versus girls and then males versus females,

contributes a major component, perhaps the major component, to the observed gender differences between males and females. There are many different agents of socialisation. Agents of socialisation are mechanisms or methods by which the social customs and norms are passed down. So family is a huge one, especially parents,

probably, well, among the most important. Probably the second most important would be peer groups, and obviously the relative importance would differ between different people, and different customs, but family and peer groups are very important in all cultures. Schools are a very important one as well, and increasingly the media and sort of the popular public opinion are also very important agents of socialization. And we'll talk a bit about the media later on. The media particularly gets a large amount of criticism for their role in perpetuating

gender, differential gender socialization and gender roles. Although my personal view is that's somewhat exaggerated because I think in a large part the media just reflects the differential socialization and gender norms. that are manifested and perpetuated in the family and in peer groups as well. But we'll get to that a bit more later on. Okay, so let's look at some of the specific evidence of how differential socialization, that is assigning gender roles to males and females, and so that boys grow up as boys and girls behaving as girls,

how does that actually happen? So there is evidence that differential socialization begins basically right from birth. So they've done studies where mothers, and I think also fathers, but particularly mothers, are asked to estimate the motor abilities of their infants, and even though there isn't any measurable objective difference between boys and girls, or at least in this study, I don't know if there was in general, but regardless, particularly they looked at how well that they would crawl down a slope. Mothers tended to say that to estimate that boys would be better at that than girls,

even though there was no objective difference. So already, just a very short time after birth, there is a perception that boys and girls, the male babies versus female babies are different. In another study, there were a bunch of pairs of parents who were interviewed within 24 hours of birth. And the study was carefully controlled so that there were no objective differences between babies in terms of weight or length

or any other physical characteristics that might be relevant. And they examined how the parents described their babies and observed any differences between whether the baby was male or female. Now, fathers in particular seem to describe their children quite differently. Fathers tended to describe their daughters as inattentive and delicate and weak, whereas they rated their sons as stronger, better coordinated and more alert. Both mothers and fathers tended to describe girls as using words like little, beautiful, pretty, and cute, whereas parents are boys, again, mothers and fathers tended to use words to describe their infants as big and strong and things like that. Again, so this is not exclusive, but tendency to use different words and to rate differentially, rate characteristics differentially, according to whether the baby was male or female,

even in the absence of any actual objective differences. And this, I remind you, within 24 hours of the infant's birth, so already, pretty much at the moment's birth, there are parents conceive of their children, think of their children differently, depending on whether they're male or female. So that's the parents. What about the children? and when do children begin to internalize these gender norms? So the evidence suggests that gender identity emerges somewhere between 18 and 24 months, so one and a half to two years.

Obviously, there's a lot of variability there, but it's sometime around that range. So even before the infants are able to speak, we think gender identity emerges. There's various ways we can test that, such as gender-type visual preferences, so you give two objects and see which one the baby tends to look at longer or look at more, one gender consistent, one gender inconsistent, and things like that. By the age of around 30 months, most children can accurately label their sex and place a picture of themselves amongst others of same-sex children. Two and a half years, gender identity is generally quite well established,

but can develop a bit earlier than that as early as 18 months. So gender identity is very quickly learned by children, in comparison to most other things, and quite robust as well. there's evidence that over the course of a child's development, conceptions of gender identity becomes somewhat softened over time. So there's some studies I read about how very young children, like three or four or five or something like that, will tend to object quite strongly to, you know,

a boy playing with girls' toys or something like that. They'll say it's wrong or use strong language, whereas older children will say it's okay, but it's unusual or something like that. So there tend to be some softening of these gender perceptions as the children age. But certainly they don't go. away and conceptions of the differences between males and females are retained throughout childhood and adolescence and indeed throughout life. Some other evidence as to the different ways in which girls and boys conceive of themselves and conceive of the difference between

their genders. Boys and girls are like, so this applies to both boys and girls. When they're asked to describe girls, the types of words that they spontaneously use are related to appearance. They'll talk about things like dresses, jewelry, hair, makeup, perfume, very appearance focus. That's boys and girls when spontaneously asked to describe girls. Conversely, when boys and girls are asked to describe males, they tend to focus on activity and behavior-related terms. So this includes descriptions relating to hitting and wrestling, rough play, action, fantasy, that sort of thing. So girls are defined primarily in terms of what they look like, boys are defined primarily in terms of what they do, particularly with a focus on sort of action, active, physically active,

types of activities. And this is also consistent with the way that parents talk to children. In particular, there's good evidence that fathers tend to talk more about physical activities and that sort of thing with their, and sports and such with their sons, and talk about appearance and other things like that with their daughters. Another interesting study relating to parents' behavior looked at the difference between mothers and fathers' interactions with their children, and they found that there was relatively little difference in caregiving per se, so that's like feeding and changing diapers and things like that, was relatively similar. But in terms of play, there were substantial differences. So mothers and fathers were observed to differ in the number of commands or polite commands or leads or imperatives and other types of things that they offer children during play. So it seems from this sort of evidence that the behaviour that the parents model when interacting

with their children also contributes to differential gender socialisation in the children's see that women behave in this way, mother behaves in this way, men, father behave in a different way. And so the argument goes, model that. It's hard to know exactly the way in which the socialization process occurs, but certainly the fact that mothers and fathers interacts differently with children is consistent with this sort of role model idea in socialization. Now, as I mentioned before, the media is also a powerful agent of socialization. And there have been a lot of interesting studies on the way that media, including television and books, portray boys and girls. So one thing, the media very seldom shows boys with feminine traits. It's become more common to show, to have females with male

traits, so, you know, action heroes who are females and that sort of thing, has become more common in recent decades. But still, effeminate males are relatively rare. In television shows and movies, there's still a predominance of male lead characters. And, And also there is still significant gender stereotypes of the roles that different characters play. So male characters are more likely to be shown as aggressive and constructive and more likely to be rewarded for this behaviour, whereas female characters are often portrayed as passive and deference and punished if they deviate from these norms. So if they act too aggressive or actively.

Another interesting study of children's books. There were nearly twice as many male as female main characters. And an interesting say of commercials, that is commercials are directed towards children, showed that there was a much greater tendency for men and boys to be portrayed in a major role, as opposed to girls and women, boys portrayed as more active and in an occupational setting, whereas girls tend to be portrayed in a more passive or domestic setting. This is consistent with establishing and normalizing particular modes of behavior for males versus females and therefore perpetuating these stereotypes and social norms.

Now, one very prominent difference between males and females, well particularly, sorry, boys and girls, is gender typing in toys that children play with. So, as I mentioned before, boys play with trucks and construction vehicles and other things like that, girls play with dolls. Obviously, there's a large component of this which is culturally determined. For example, one example given in a study that I was reading was that almost all parents would be upset if their boy was given Barbie dolls as a present. So how early does this gender difference in toy preference become manifest? So there have been a lot of different studies on this to see how, when children begin to express preference for gender-type toys.

And it seems that boys and girls will select different toys as early as about 12 months. So this is even before the one and a half two-year period that we mentioned before as being the time when children sort of begin to establish their own gender identity. So this is about one year of age that children begin expressing preference for male versus female toys according to their own gender. And there's evidence that this stereotypical knowledge is very robust and maintained over time. So in one interesting experiment, children were faster in assigning toys to stereotype congruent categories versus stereotypical. type incongruent category. So if they had to give a truck to a girl, it sort of took them longer to process that than giving a truck to a boy, for instance. So this is consistent with the idea that this gender stereotype knowledge is sort of deeply ingrained. The study that I found

that looked at preference differences in the youngest children found that there were no differences in toy preference at the age of three months. But there were differences at the age of 12 months, even perhaps as early as 10 months, so even maybe a little bit under a year, but not at the age of three months. So it's not from birth that children exhibit this difference in toy preferences, but not too long after birth, around a year of age, that they begin expressing these preferences. So obviously there's a significant cultural component to toy selection. There's obviously not a gene that predisposes girls to be more interested in Barbies. However, that said, there is some very interesting evidence about the role of hormones in affecting interests and personality characteristics,

in particular toy preference, but I'll discuss this in more detail when we get to the hormones section. So we'll defer that for now. One final point is that it seems that schools do contribute a at least significant component to this differential gender socialization. So in one interesting study, there were three groups, three types of classrooms that were in which the children were divided up into groups using three different methods. One was to use male and female groups, another one was to use red and green groups, and with mixages of male and females, and another group, sorry, the third condition was to just not use any explicit groups at all in whatever activities they were doing. And this was, these groups were maintained for four weeks, and then the children completed various test measures of gender and intergroup attitudes. And as was consistent with the prediction that the authors of this study made, the use of gender groups is,

in the class increased levels of gender stereotyping, whereas the use of colour groups did not. So what do we learn from this study? It seems to indicate that to the extent that functional grouping, in other words, separations of male and females into different groups or different categories or different activities increases the levels to which there is a perceived difference between males and females and accentuates those stereotypes. Of course, this was an artificial environment, but we can see in the real world how boys and girls are separated in various explicit and implicit ways all the time. And so this sort of behaviour will, it seems, serve to increase levels of gender stereotyping and perceived difference.

Okay, so that's all we have to say about socialisation behaviours explicitly. Of course, there'll be more of this scattered throughout the other topics we have to talk about. But now I'll move on to discussing discrimination and bias, with a particular focus on employment. And this sort of research, I think, helps to shed a lot of light on. the reasons for a prevailing wage gap and also for occupational segregation, which we'll talk about in a bit more detail later on. The first thing to note, I think, about overt discrimination is that although there are undoubtedly people who have a dislike for those of the other gender, males who dislike females, females who dislike males, these sorts of attitudes are, as far as we can tell, relatively rare. In other words, overt misogynism is not especially common in terms of people at least declaring that they hate females or something like that. Indeed, when you do studies about getting people to rate the qualities of males and females, there's actually a tendency for females to be rated as more likable than males.

Generally, this seems to be a product of the fact that the traditionally feminine qualities like being kind and nurturing and things like that and cooperative, communal, are generally perceived to be more positive in an overall evaluative sense as compared to the traditionally masculine characteristics, so including aggression and dominance and other things like that. So in terms of likeability, women as a group tend to outscore males as a group. However, when this is applied to the workplace, we see some very different results, because men also tend to be perceived as being more competent than females, and this is a very robust finding. In particular, one study stated it as people believe that women, more than men, manifest the communal qualities that they think typify homemakers, and that men, more than women, manifest the agentic qualities that they think typify employees.

And I would add to that in particular that typify management and people in positions of power. And a fair bit of research has demonstrated these sorts of attitudes are not exclusively held by men. They are held by men and women as well. So these types of discrimination and these types of bias and perceptions of correct gender roles, again, tend to be held by both males and females at relatively equal levels. as far as we can determine. So the basic finding from this type of research seems to be something like the following.

It seems to be that something like the following scenario exists in many workplaces and indeed in the employment sphere as a whole. That a competent manager is identified as having certain characteristics which are perceived to be masculine. So this is things like power and being aggressive

and competency and being active, and being active, assertive, all of these sorts of what are called agentic qualities, being an active agent. So that is the perception of what a good manager, a good leader, looks like. Women are perceived not to have these characteristics, or at least are perceived not to have them to the degree that males do. And therefore, there's a tendency to see females as less qualified, less competent, less able to fulfill these sorts of particularly higher leadership roles, regardless of their actual qualifications or actual abilities. And this sort of bias is manifest in a lot of interesting ways.

So there have been studies where the identical piece of work is presented and described as being done by a man or a woman, and it's rated better when it's said to have been done by a man than when it's said to have been done by a woman, because men are perceived being more competent. There are also very interesting studies where a bunch of resumes are sent out, and the only thing that's different is whether the name attached to the resume, and picture is male or female and that the content of the race may in terms of experience and

qualifications is identical and more of the male job applicants receive follow-ups and receive interviews than the female applicants. Again, I think this is fairly clear evidence that there is a bias in the employment and promotion and interviewing components of the workforce in favor of males, as a result of them being, as males perceived to be more competent and possessing the type of skills that tend to be more valued by employers, particularly, again, in leadership and executive levels. Now, this does not hold, all of the things I'm being saying, do not hold for occupations which are typically viewed as being female occupations. So in those particular instances, so these sort of occupations include teachers and caring roles, nursing, that sort of thing.

Men are not considered to be superior to women in those types of roles. And so, again, that goes some way to explaining the occupational segregation that that we'll discuss a bit more later on. Now, this tendency to rate female, to rate work by women as inferior to work by men, is most pronounced when there's a

degree of, when there's a substantial degree of ambiguity in terms of measuring the quality of the work. So if it's something that can be very easily quantified and measured in an objective way, then these biases tend to be smaller. But increasingly, increasingly

in sort of modern workplaces and also at higher levels of management and such things, the degree to which an individual's contribution can be measured for competency and quality, etc., is quite small, because people tend to work in groups, and it tends to be very difficult to measure exactly the performance of the group, and certainly individuals within the group. And so there's a fair bit of wiggle room, you might say, for subjective biases to have an influence in the decision in terms of measuring incompetence and a degree of effort. And these studies have indicated that the larger this degree of ambiguity is, the more pronounced

tend to be the bias against women's work. Ambiguous behaviours that women exhibit art tend to be interpreted in a negative light, whereas when exhibited by males, they tend to be exhibited in a positive light. Similarly, successful work by a woman is more likely to be interpreted as being the result of their situation, or luck, or something. other external characteristic, whereas successful work by male is more likely to be interpreted as resulting from their own competence or hard work. Now, I've just been talking about how women tend to be rated as inferior and tend to be

to possess in a smaller degree those types of characteristics which are thought to be requisite for effective leaders and managers. However, there's a flip side to this which makes the situation particularly difficult because it's been found in a number of studies that when women do exhibit these types of masculine characteristics of being more assertive and agentic, that this results in them being perceived in a negative way. They are perceived to be bitter, quarrelsome, selfish, deceitful, angry, devious, etc., whereas males behaving in essentially the same way are not perceived in that way.

And the theory is that when males exhibit these types of characteristics, or behaviors which could potentially be seen as being quarrelsome or selfish or aggressive, that is perceived to be more normal because, after all, people expect men to behave more in that way, whereas when a female exhibits the behaviour is to exactly the same degree, that is interpreted to be more as a result of her extreme personality, because it's less congruent with her gender identity and less congruent with her perceived gender role. Therefore, a male and a female getting equally angry, the male will just be perceived to be acting like all males do, whereas the female will be perceived to be uniquely an angry person.

and these types of reactions result in females who behave in this way, tending to be disliked. They tend to be found to be less socially appealing, particularly by the men who are in the positions of power who may be deciding whether they are promoted, whether the women receive promotions or not. So this is a general principle. When people step outside gender norms and behave in ways that are incongruent

with their socially established gender identity, people tend to dislike them. People don't like that. and feel uncomfortable, but also it causes them to attribute those sort of deviances to the person's personality, which makes them a bad person or a problematic person or a deviant person, a troublemaker, and so people tend not to like them as much. Now, you might think that this shouldn't be particularly irrelevant. Sure, women who behave in these sort of agentic ways might be disliked, but shouldn't it be the case that the people who have the highest skills are promoted, and so it doesn't

matter. And indeed, if women are not being promoted, then is this not a sign that there is sort of overt discrimination against women because the managers just don't like women or something like that? I don't think the evidence is most consistent with that. I think that it's more consistent with somewhat more subtle phenomenon, which is that, again, in many of these circumstances, assessing competence and performance and qualifications is difficult. It's ambiguous. And so what tends to happen is that a substantial component of subjective bias and of basically personal evaluation creeps in to determining their competence. So in other words, the person conducting the interview or determining the promotion or whatever, their attitude towards the person they're evaluating seeps over and clouds the judgment that they make. So these types of agentic women whom they dislike because their behavior is inconsistent with the gender stereotype receive lower evaluations.

not just because they are women, or maybe it's not because they're women per se, because their work is still very high quality, but it's because they are not liked as much. Their social evaluation is lower, therefore this creeps over into the evaluation of their work. And this is largely, I think, a subconscious thing. People think they're being fair and objective, but as I've discussed in previous episodes, people are very bad at introspecting about their reasons for doing things and for making particular evaluations, and biases creep in in all sorts of ways. So it seems to be that the evidence points to the fact that negative social relations with these sort of what I'm going to call agentic women lead to more negative evaluations of their work and they perceive to be less confident and more troublesome. And therefore, both of these factors contribute them not getting promotions and not being rewarded as much as their male counterparts for successful work. And I want to emphasize, although the evidence for this particular claim is not as strong as the other things I've been saying, it seems that these types of biases, are present for both men and women. So in other words, men and women managers will tend to act in this way.

I think there is evidence that women managers are less biased against women in this way, but I do believe there is evidence that they still do exhibit these biases to some extent. But the evidence is a little bit mixed on that, the extent to which this is exhibited by males and females. But I think in general it's definitely the case that these generals are very deeply ingrained in society, and it's not just the case that it's only men or only women who are, participating in the socialisation process and who exhibit these sorts of biases. It's most certainly both. So just to recap, the basic idea there, the basic idea of why women are not receiving as many promotions, why they're not paid as much, and why they're not perceived

to be as competent, is that if women behave in a way that's consistent with their perceived gender role, so that they behave in a more submissive way, less aggressive, less agentic, then they are not perceived to exhibit the characteristics of a good manager or of a competent employee and therefore they tend not to receive the same promotions or the same prestige. They're not perceived as competent as their male counterparts. Conversely, if they do exhibit these types of agentic, more aggressive characteristics and behaviours, then they are perceived to be more competent, but they are disliked, particularly by their male counterparts, although, again, not necessarily exclusively

by males and females alike, and this, the fact that they're disliked seeps into biases about the judgment of how capable they are, and also. also just how, whether they will be good members to the team or whether they are quarrelsome and difficult to work with, and therefore, as they're perceived to be more quarrelsome and less competent, they are still not recommended for the promotion or not, or for the raise or anything. This has been, this situation has been characterized as a sort of a catch-22 situation. If the female tries to break out of the gender roles, they are, they are perceived as being difficult to work with and therefore deny the promotion.

if they try to avoid that and remain within the traditional gender roles, then they are not perceived to exhibit the qualities necessary for a competent leader or executive, and therefore they are denied the promotion. So in either situation, women are unable to break through what's called the glass ceiling. This is the idea that there's some sort of limit to how far women can rise in an organization. Obviously, what I've been talking about are broad generalizations, and certainly don't describe in any systematic way how women and men behave exclusively with each other. Obviously, there are examples of women who have risen to the top of their organizations,

and obviously there are plenty of examples of women, you know, who are perceived to be competent and agentic, etc., etc. The point is there is good evidence that these types of biases and social norms operate in general, on average, in many social settings, particularly employment settings. And so, although they're not universal, you know, everyone doesn't think this, everyone doesn't behave in this way. And the degree to which people behave in this way varies, according to the situation, but nonetheless these types of processes do seem to be very important.

Before we finish off this part one of the sex and gender series, we will look at how discrimination and bias affect women into other important spheres, voting, that is politics, and in healthcare. First of all, let's talk a little bit about voting. So there have been quite a few studies on how the gender of candidates affects their performance, At least in the US, there doesn't seem to be any difference in the rate of success in terms of achieving the inside office of female versus male candidates, either in the Democratic or Republican parties. In the case of presidential candidates, it's a lot more difficult because obviously there have not been any female presidents as yet, and very few, well, as far as I know, no female candidates even have been nominated by either of the major parties. there have of course been, recently, we, for example, had Hillary Clinton running for the Democratic nomination. She was unsuccessful, and I think there may have been some other women who have attempted to acquire the Democratic nomination,

but we don't really have very much data to work with in regards to the presidential election. So in terms of actual success rates, it seems to be fairly consistent between both the candidates. between male and female candidates. If we look at more microdata, we look at actual experimental results in surveys, we come across some rather interesting results. First of all, voters perceive male candidates to be better at handling crime and foreign affairs,

and female candidates as being better at helping the poor and protecting women's rights. So male and female voters both perceive candidates in a gendered manner, as possessing qualities consistent with their gender role. And that's not especially surprising. There is also an overall tendency for American women to vote for Democrats much more than Republicans and, conversely, for males to vote Republican disproportionately.

Now, if we look at surveys that have explicitly asked candidates about a gender preference, usually the question is something like, if two equally qualified candidates were running for office, one man and one woman, which would you be more likely to vote for? we see some interesting results. The studies that I found showed that roughly half of men and about 60% of women expressed a preference one way or the other. That is, half of men didn't care whether it was male or female, at least this was their stated opinion, and about 60% about 40% of women expressed no preference for male or female. Of those who did express a preference, most women preferred the female candidate, about 62%, and most men, 68% preferred the male candidate.

So, in other words, we can summarize that by saying that overall, slightly more women had a preference one way or the other, but there was a minority of women who preferred male over female, whereas that the number of male candidates who preferred female over male was very small. And so, although fewer men expressed a preference one way or the other, more of those who did express a preference preferred male over female. So overall, if you incorporate both the proportion of subjects who expressed a preference and the proportion that voted for their own gender, overall, there does seem to be a bias for females to vote for female candidates and males to vote for male candidates, but it's relatively small. It's not an enormous effect. And it seems that those two effects roughly equal in size, and given that males and females both constitute roughly 50% of the population, it's therefore unsurprising that we find roughly equal success rates for male and female candidates,

in the US. Although there are bias effects for both males and female voters, males slightly more likely to vote male, female is slightly more likely to vote female, overall, of course. These two biases roughly cancel each other out, and so overall, there's no particular differential success of male versus female

candidates. Now, that's notwithstanding the previous effect that I noted about both males and females perceiving male candidates as being better at certain things crime in foreign affairs, and female candidates being better at other things. And one can also imagine, although I don't know there's been an explicit study of this that similar effects of the similar glass-sealing

effects of gender incongruent behaviors of agentic women and such things, also operate in the political arena, as we found that they did in the corporate arena. So in other words, similar social mechanisms that prevent women from rising or make it more difficult for women to rise to high positions in the business world also mean that it's more difficult for them to rise to high positions in the political world, to receive nominations of major parties and such. So that may partly explain the relative lack of women in political positions. It doesn't seem to be the case that there's an overall tendency of people to vote for men over women.

But certainly there are many more men in positions of political power and particularly in upper positions of political power than there are women. Okay, moving on to healthcare. There's very interesting evidence about differential treatment of men versus women by healthcare practitioners. First of all, the rate of underutilisation of services and delaying of seeking of medical attention and so on of male seems to be much greater than that of females, and this probably doesn't surprise many people. It's probable that this relates to male stereotypes as needing to be strong and independent and self-reliant, these type of agentic qualities that we discussed previously, these types of behaviours and attitudes mitigate against seeking early treatment or complaining too much about conditions. But it does lead to later diagnosis and poorer treatment and poor health outcomes for men in many conditions. So that's a particular problem, basically, about getting men to go to the doctor and to get things checked up,

which seems to be, at least in part, probably largely, caused by differential gender socialization. There's another component of healthcare which is interesting and particularly disturbing. in many Asian countries, particularly China and India, but others as well, there is a fairly strong preference for many families to have male children as opposed to female children for various cultural and social reasons. There's a study that I looked at in India actually found that mothers were more likely to visit antinatal clinics and receive tetanus vaccinations and also to essentially invest in prenatal care more substantially when they knew they had male children versus when they knew they had,

that is when they were pregnant with a male baby versus when they were pregnant with a female baby. And indeed, according to the authors, the sex selective prenatal care, just in the use of tetanus vaccinations or treatments alone, explained about 4 to 10% of the excess female neonatal mortality in India, that is, the excess rate at which female babies die of, or, and so. over male babies because essentially parents are making, or particularly the mothers, are making more effort and investing more resources into the male child. Selective infanticide of female infants in India and China is certainly not unknown, and that's a much more direct expression of parent sexual preference, also selective abortions, relatively

common as well. But this particular study I found quite interesting because it exhibits a much more subtle example of how social pressures and stereotypes about gender and which gender is preferable to have as a child and so on, which is going to be more useful to provide for you in old age or for whatever exact reasons are. There's all sorts of reasons why this preference exists. But anyway, how these factors then influence these decisions, even these small decisions about the extent to which one seeks medical care or the extent to which mothers invest in in prenatal medical care and visit clinics and such. and this in turn leads on to differential neonatal mortality rates. Very interesting and quite disturbing study, actually.

That's more relevant to the developing world rather than the Western world, but I think it does highlight that these sorts of gender, these effects of gender socializations and stereotyping and gender identity have very strong effects cross-culturally, although the precise nature of the effects certainly will differ between different countries. Now, there's another interesting body of literature, again, mostly in Western countries that I discovered, which is essentially that doctors and nurses, but particularly male doctors, but it seems to apply to female nurses as well. And of course, that I'm sort of making statements

consistent with the gender stereotypes here that males are doctors and women are females, but in terms of the sheer numbers, that is by far the case, less than it used to be, but still there is a fairly large amount of occupational segregation there. But anyway, it seems to be the case that medical practitioners consider the women's complaints about pain in particular, but also other symptoms, particularly pain, much less seriously

than those of males. So, there's all sorts of results about men receiving more painkillers than women, or receiving painkiller treatments earlier, or for longer, or higher doses. And this seems to be related to an attitude that many healthcare practitioners express, that women

are less sensitive to pain and more tolerant of pain, but also more likely to report pain and express pain than males are. So there's a sort of interesting dichotomy there. It's perceived that females are both less affected by pain, but also more likely to report pain. And so the idea is that then if a male reports pain or expresses discomfort, then the conception there is that it's more likely that the pain is debilitating or is really bad for the male than the female, because women both have a high pain threshold and also a lower reporting threshold, if you like.

So I guess the implicit notion here is that a report of pain by a male should be taken more seriously than a report of pain by a female. Whether this is true or not is another matter. It's probably, well, there does seem to be some evidence that men and women do experience pain in somewhat different ways. It's very difficult to know exactly what the nature of this is. I mean, one can't rely on self-report because you don't necessarily know if their reporting is different or if the actual experience is different.

different parts of the brain light up a little bit differently and there do seem to be some differences in hormones and other things between men and women when they're experiencing pain but again it's very difficult to know whether that results in a different subjective experience or not so essentially we can't measure pain in any real objective way so there's no real way of knowing if women are more sensitive to pain or have a high tolerance or whatever than men it might be there might be some truth to that but i think the evidence is really just not uh not sufficient to make that claim with confidence but regardless it certainly seems to be the perceptive that perceptive that among medical practitioners and indeed the general public, that that is the case. And therefore, leading to this phenomenon of men receiving more considered and more extensive treatment for pain than women. And this has been shown to lead to more complications for women and inferior outcomes in various conditions. So it is sort of an interesting juxtaposition there.

On the one hand, men have poorer outcomes because they tend to report much later and go to the, and seek medical help much less frequently, but conversely they tend to have better outcomes insofar as their reports, particularly of pain, are treated more seriously by medical practitioners. So in both cases, the differential gender perceptions, gender roles and identities, are having a very tangible effect on social outcomes in terms of the way that medical practitioners interact with patients. Okay, so that's all for this part one of sex and gender. but join me next time for part two when I'll discuss some biological differences between males and females and talk about hormones,

and then we'll look at occupational segregation, emotions and some other issues of interest. Thanks for listening and I'll talk to you next time.