Stereotypically, men are supposed to know more about cars than women.
In 1974, Deaux & Emswiller asked a group of male and female participants to evaluate the
performance of a man or a woman conducting either a masculine or a feminine task.
The masculine task was identifying a tire jack, used for changing the wheel on a car.
The feminine task was identifying a mop.
Which even I know is used for cleaning the floor!
So, participants had to decide whether a person’s performance on these tasks was due to ability
or luck.
What did they find?
On this chart, you can see that the y-axis shows us whether participants thought the
person’s performance was due to luck or ability.
Higher numbers mean it is more due to ability.
The x-axis shows the two tasks, the masculine task and the feminine task.
The men performing the task are indicated by the blue, and the woman by the green.
Deaux and Emswiller found that when a man performed well on a masculine task, participants
were more likely to attribute their performance to skill.
However, when a woman performed just as well as a man on the same task, participants were
more likely to attribute the woman’s performance to luck.
When it came to evaluating a man and a woman conducting a feminine task, participants attributed
a woman’s successful performance to skill.
But they attributed a man’s successful performance to skill as well.
This was not the case for a woman performing well in a masculine task!
The participants saw the same behaviour––both genders knowing about cars, but one is seen
as to be supporting the stereotype whilst the other is just dismissed.
Here’s an explanation for why stereotypes exist or why they remain.
In the video that we linked to just before this video, did you hear where they mention
that over education in women leads to ugliness, premature aging and beard growth?
We laugh at that because it just sounds ridiculous, but that was a real theory about a hundred
years ago, as women were trying to get access to education.
A lot of men thought it wasn’t good for women to be educated.
They thought that women would become like men, they would become haggard, ugly and masculine
looking.
A lot of people who believed this were educated people!
And look, if education really did make you more masculine looking, I might even sign
up to do another PhD!
So, why would apparently smart people believe something so stupid?
The answer would be because it’s convenient for them, because they want to believe that.
They might feel threatened by women knocking on the doors of education and power, with
all the freedom that implies.
This is what is called a legitimising myth.
It legitimises the status quo.
The video of the song, “Bad Girls” by M.I.A., was made by a political director and
even though it doesn’t explicitly reference it, it’s commenting on the fact that women
are not permitted to drive vehicles in Saudi Arabia.
It was reported in 2013 a top Saudi cleric commented that driving damages female reproductive
organs.
The story attracted a lot of international pressure and this obviously ridiculous fact
was used to legitimise the status quo.
Likewise, if I’m a male CEO of a company and I’m wandering around thinking, “Wow,
there’s not many women who are also CEOs, why is that?”
I have to make sense of that, and one of the ways to explain that is because I’m a guy
in this patriarchal world and I’ve benefited from privilege.
Now, not many people like to think they’ve benefitted from privilege, so we don’t like
to explain things in this way.
Another explanation could be that there’s not many female CEOs because they’re not
interested.
They’re not that ambitious.
They’re not boardroom material.
They fall apart under pressure.
They’re too emotional.
People might be motivated to believe these inaccurate things to help them rationalise
the status quo in a non-threatening way.