The attitudes do not stay inside people’s heads
Women in STEM fields have a laundry list of stories about men telling them they aren’t clever enough to be there.
A new study published Wednesday adds to a growing body of hard evidence to back up those stories.
It finds that men in STEM subject areas overestimate their own intelligence and credentials, [and] underestimate the abilities of female colleagues, and that as a result, women themselves doubt their abilities — even when hard evidence such as grades say otherwise.
It’s a wonderful loop, isn’t it – men think they’re better than they are so they forge confidently ahead regardless and they feel entitled to tell women they’re not good enough so women are kneecapped, so men think they’re even more better than they are and so on forever.
The students worked in groups and as partners and when asked to rate themselves compared to their closest workmate, the men thought they’d be smarter than 61 percent of their colleagues. Women put the number closer to 33 percent.
“This echoes what has been previously shown in the literature; a review of nearly 20 published papers on self-estimated intelligence concluded that men rate themselves higher than women on self-estimated intelligence,” Cooper and Brownell wrote in their report, published in Advances in Physiology Education.
“More and more of these studies are painting similar pictures,” Brownell said.
Yes, I’ve seen them before, and I bet we all have.
So what’s the result? STEM fields are full of Damore-type men telling women they’re not smart enough, or, more euphemistically aka deniably they’re more into relationships than mathematics. Also, in a thrilling new bonus, they have platoons of thinky men telling us all that this is Free Speech and must be not only protected but encouraged and widely disseminated and greeted with rapture. How dare Google fire Damore just for fitting this pattern of Mediocre Men Telling Women They Are Too Stupid Empathetic to Work at Google?
Ilana Seidel Horn, a professor of mathematics education at Vanderbilt University, says it’s been shown that girls and women doubt their own mastery of a subject more than boys and men do.
“Really bright girls often don’t feel like they know something unless they very much understand it, whereas boys are more comfortable saying they understand something without having an actual deeper understanding,” Horn said.
It’s more of a guy thing.
The attitudes do not stay inside people’s heads. Pearson said she felt the disdain of her male classmates regularly.
“I can’t even tell you how many of my early successes (awards and grants) were attributed to my being the only girl, and ‘they had to’ give the award to a woman,” Pearson said.
“I am reasonably successful by a variety of measures, but I still doubt everything I do. And it’s because a lifetime of being told I don’t belong and I’m not good enough that got into my head.”
Even the most confident girl or woman might begin to doubt herself when confronted with such attitudes from fellow students, teachers and colleagues, Brownell said.
Drip drip drip.
“Really bright girls often don’t feel like they know something unless they very much understand it, whereas boys are more comfortable saying they understand something without having an actual deeper understanding,”
I think that what is portrayed as the “girls” attitude is the more reasonable of the two, indeed emminently reasonable. People who think they understand things when they patently don’t drive me bonkers and should have nasty smelly things dropped on them from a great height.
I agree with Bernard. Nothing in the report I saw of that study indicated which group’s view of itself was more accurate: in other words, we can’t say whether the problem is women underrating themselves or men overrating themselves, or both. (We do know that men are underrating women, though.)
It’s interesting to me that all the reports I’ve read of this study seem to phrase it as the former. I can’t help but wonder if that interpretation is more appealing because it’s a way of making this women’s problem (“you gals need to have more confidence and be more assertive like us men”) as opposed to a men’s problem (“men are arrogantly overestimating their own abilities; they ought to be more candid and humble like women”).
In re #1 and #2: In normal situations, I think I would agree with that assessment. But other studies I’ve seen have demonstrated that women actually consider themselves inadequate and not fully capable even when they are at the top of their field and have demonstrated their capability over and over. I have seen this happen in my students pretty much from the day I started teaching.
My brightest female student, capable of nearly anything she set her mind to, tended to denigrate her abilities and believe she was not able to shine. My least capable male students often assume they are totally capable, and my most capable male students – don’t even get me started! And when one of my female students begins to marvel because she is doing so well in science, which she didn’t assume she was any good at, the male student sitting beside her will begin to instruct her in the fact that this course is “easy” (it isn’t) and that it isn’t really science. My suspicion is that last bit, about easy not-really-science has a lot to do with the fact that the teacher is (cough, cough) a woman.
In short, males not only build up their own ability, they are willing to point out to women who are doing well that it is only because this isn’t really one of those thinky male STEM classes at all, it’s some watered down version of girl-STEM that has been made so simple even a female could excel. My female students tend to accept this without question. If I happen to catch the conversation, I swoop in (not really) and attempt to explain that this is, in fact, real science, and that they are, in fact, doing very very well. Unfortunately, I have less credibility to the young, non-scientist male student running down both the female student and the female teacher, so she usually gives me a doubtful look and turns her back on future science endeavors. It makes me want to…I don’t know, lash out or something. I can’t, because I am teacher, I am head of civilized classroom, I am contracted to behave myself.
So rather than ask which of the two is the more accurate view, we should entertain the possibility that neither view is accurate.
Bernard, yes, absolutely. I was thinking that the whole time I was typing but ended up not including it so as not to obscure the core point. Wanting full understanding is more reasonable, plus thinking you’re Top Smart when you’re not is just so much more repellent than the inverse – and yet practically speaking the first works better…at least for men because they have that reputational advantage. Argh.
iknklast,
I agree — I suspect that the “correct” answer is “it’s a little of both. Women are socialized to underestimate and/or understate their abilities, and men are socialized to overestimate and/or overstate theirs.”
I think one of my strangest moments on this subject came a couple of years ago, when I made a trip to NYC. While I was there, I looked up and had dinner with one of my cousins that I had not seen in years. This woman is a well respected biochemist, teaches at NYU, has published tons of research, and is scary smart.
I have a brother who is about the same age as this cousin (a couple of years older than me). They were in school together. My brother is one of those who has more confidence than is justified. He is basically Trump in a worse suit, without the gold plating and the money. He boasts about how smart he is, how much smarter he was than his teachers (he dropped out of high school, took 20 years to get through college, and was then unable to get a job because…well, because most schools, even in Oklahoma, do not want to hire history teachers who make statements that he likes black people, everyone should own one or two). He has a good memory, like everyone in my family, so he can spout facts and trivia, like everyone in my family. What he cannot do is complete a task, nor can he remember any fact that contradicts what he believes.
So imagine my horror when I’m sitting there with my brilliant, accomplished cousin who had made it to the top of her field, and she is talking about old times when she would argue with my brother, and she commented, “[X] is just so smart!”. She is much smarter, and even if she wasn’t, the fact of what she accomplished showed that she was substantially less lazy, more able to complete tasks, etc. She believed my overrated brother to be smarter than her. I was stunned. I had no idea what to say. We tend to keep the nastinesses of my family within the immediate family, so I didn’t feel I could say “No, he’s a fake” or “he’s a rotten person” or anything else.
I do the same thing. I work with people who are not trained in my field, know nothing about my field (but assume they do – everyone thinks they understand environmental science), and proceed to explain to me why I am wrong about everything. Why, oh why, do I constantly second guess myself? Because I was brought up that way…and that sort of training is very hard to get rid of. I know, because I’ve been making a concentrated effort for years.
I think women underestimating themselves out loud, to each other, is also a bonding/supporting thing. When I taught civil engineering it was unusual to have any women at all in my classes; one year I ended up with three, cadets from the nearby maritime academy. In the class they took one was exceptional, the other two were perfectly competent. All of them moaned and griped about how difficult the work was, how they’d never succeed, etc. One young woman memorably announced periodically, ‘I wish I’d been a FLORIST!’. I mentioned to them once that I knew they were joking around (and supporting each other in their efforts)…but any men hearing them talk like that would actually believe them.
guest, that may happen some of the time, but I know that was never the case with me. When I put myself down, I really believe it…even if I’ve demonstrated that it is not true.
Not too startling a finding, in a culture which values ‘confidence’ above competence. This is the New Thought, Horatio Alger, Mary Baker Eddy, Werner Erhard chickens coming home to roost.
If you spend more effort teaching boys to THINK they can do things, rather than actually doing them, you get an entire culture of Dunning-Kruger demonstrations. The White House comes to mind…