Living Dolls: The Return of Sexism

by Natasha Walter

  In the eyes of those who subscribe to biological determinism, there is a good fit between the world as it is today and the innate aptitudes of men and women. There is no dissatisfaction, there is no frustration, there is no misfiring between our desires and our situations. Every aspect of inequality that we see today can be explained by the different genetic and hormonal make-up of men and women; if women earn less, if men have more power, if women do more domestic work, if men have more status, then this is simply the way that things are meant to be. In this way the biological determinism of the twenty-first century works in the same way as the biological determinism of the nineteenth century, which told women who sought change that they were entirely unsuited to higher education or physical exertion. In Victorian Britain dissent was nevertheless voiced by a small but determined minority, which created real social change for women that proved the fatalists wrong. If we are to move forward towards greater freedom and equality in this generation, we would need to overcome the influences of these stereotypes, which currently affect our expectations of our children and our expectations of our partners and ourselves. We would need to ask again why it is that we are allowing the stereotypes of the nurturing, empathetic woman and the powerful, logical man to be seen as natural and inevitable and look instead at how these assumptions have been constructed, how they are maintained and how they can be challenged.

  The stereotype of the male leader

  As we saw in the first half of this book, the pervasive sexualisation of women in the public realm cuts away at their true empowerment. It encourages many women to model themselves on a sexy doll rather than seeking other kinds of success. But this is not the only reason women may find that it is still hard for them to reach for empowerment in many fields. The operation of traditional stereotypes in public and private life also discourages women from taking on certain roles.

  The continued influence of traditional stereotypes encourages people to believe that women will lack the authority and competence of men in certain areas. In the eyes of some of those who subscribe to biological explanations for sex differences, the pursuit of power is seen as peculiarly male. As a writer in the New York Times said recently: ‘It makes some sense that after almost a century of electorates made up by as many women as men, the number of female politicians remains pathetically small in most Western democracies … Those qualities associated with low testosterone – patience, risk aversion, empathy … are just lousy qualities in the crapshoot of electoral politics … It is foolish to insist that numerical inequality is always a function of bias rather than biology… We shouldn’t be shocked if gender inequality endures.’25 Or, as an article in Newsweek had it: ‘Alpha males are high on testosterone, the hormone that underlies almost all the typical traits of the politico-sexual animal: high levels of testosterone make for a high sex drive, a love of risks, aggressiveness and competitiveness. “These people have a strong need to win at games, which is obviously important in power politics”.’26

  One characteristic of the new biological determinism is that it promotes a zero-sum view of masculinity and femininity, in which the more masculine you are, the more you are assumed to be lacking in feminine traits, and vice versa. This was made particularly explicit in the BBC programme Secrets of the Sexes, where, in one telling scene, the men and women in the programme were placed on a ruler, where the middle was zero, the left-hand end said 100 per cent female and the right-hand end 100 per cent male. If an individual excelled in systemising or aggression, they were moved rightwards; if they excelled in empathy or language, they were moved leftwards.27 There was no possibility, in this visual realisation of the new determinism, for a person to combine the strengths of a man and a woman. The way that masculinity and femininity are now so often seen as mutually exclusive, so that the more masculine you are the less feminine you are, operates against women who seek power. Because in the eyes of those influenced by traditional stereotypes, a man seeking power enhances his masculinity, but a woman seeking power reduces her femininity. And this can be extremely negative for a woman who goes into politics, as it makes her seem not quite human, as though she has given up something essential about herself.

  We can see this unease with powerful women constantly in our culture. Every woman who seeks power runs the risk of becoming a figure such as Hillary Clinton, who was the failed candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination in the US in 2008, and who was constantly characterised as competent, but cold and inhuman, or a figure such as Ségolène Royal, who was the failed candidate for president of France in 2007, who was characterised as elegantly feminine, but therefore insufficiently competent and authoritative. What women who seek power gain in authority, they will lose in femininity, and vice versa. It takes a terrific balancing act, achieved by few women, to maintain both the necessary authority and the necessary femininity to be seen as fully human in politics. On the other hand, there will always be a man running alongside the would-be powerful woman, who will be benefiting from the operation of the stereotype of the masculine leader, and whose humanity will be enhanced rather than threatened by his bid for power.

  The discomfort our society still feels about the woman who overtly seeks power means that thirty years after Margaret Thatcher managed to crack the stereotype temporarily, British politics has reverted to an aggressively masculine cabal; the leaders of all the major parties are men. Women who attempt to break through this wall of masculinity do not need to be substantively attacked, they can simply be mocked as unfeminine, and the operation of the stereotype will do the rest. A loss of femininity in style or appearance, in speech or manner, will be enough to discredit the woman who seeks power, who will immediately be seen as strident, chilly and even inhuman. This discomfort with her loss of femininity is often framed in terms of criticism of the unfeminine appearance of a powerful woman. So we hear about the ‘prison warden haircut’ and ‘too tight on top mannish pinstripe’ of Jacqui Smith, then the British home secretary,28 and the German chancellor Angela Merkel’s ‘unstylish haircut, frumpish appearance’.29 The way that powerful women are easily wrongfooted by their lack of femininity can be seen when you look at the reaction by the political press to the visit of the ex-model Carla Bruni to London with her husband, Nicolas Sarkozy, president of France. The silent beauty was held up as the perfect specimen of womanhood against the failings of the British politicians. While she ‘looked chic in a simple one-shoulder purple gown’, according to the Daily Mail, ‘back on dowdy street’ the MP Hazel Blears wore ‘hideous boots, horrible bag, untidy and needs her roots retouching’.30 The delight the press took in her presence threw into relief the unease they express towards all women who actually enter politics to seek power on their own terms, rather than marry politically powerful men, and the defeminisation this seems to entail.

  To see how strongly the stereotype against power-hungry women still operates, look at the reactions to Hillary Clinton in her bid for the presidential candidacy in the US in 2008. Her very competence was recast not as a qualification for the job, as it would have been in a man, but as something cold and artificial. Much debate was generated about whether or not her laugh was a human sound or a sign of her lack of normal humanity. As the New Yorker described the reaction to her laughter in one debate: ‘Sean Hannity played an audio clip seven times and described the candidate’s laughter as “frightening.” Bill O’Reilly trotted out a Fox News “body-language expert” to pronounce the laughter “evil.” Dick Morris, the onetime Clinton adviser turned full-time Clinton trasher, described it as “loud, inappropriate, and mirthless.” … In the Times, Frank Rich wrote, “Now Mrs. Clinton is erupting in a laugh with all the spontaneity of an alarm clock buzzer.” … And The Politico, a new online political newspaper, identified the problem as “a laugh that sounded like it was programmed by computer.”’31 The idea that Clinton’s laugh – which people who know her in real life tend to describe as warm and genuine – is fake, frightening and more like an alarm clock or a compute
r than a human being, suggests to everyone that a woman like Clinton, a woman seeking power, has lost her femininity to such a degree that she is almost unnatural.

  Women in the UK experience similar reactions when they are seen to be too powerful. When Baroness Vadera, an adviser to Gordon Brown, made some ill-advised comments to the press about the possibility of recovery from the recession in 2009, we heard a deluge of criticism from the media, much of which focused on how unfeminine she was. As a writer in the Guardian summed it up, this media coverage implied that Baroness Vadera ‘is not exactly a woman. According to some fella in the Spectator, she is an “assassin … ass-kicker … axe-wielder”’. One presenter on the Today programme apparently said of her: ‘Civil servants call her Shrieky Shriti. Others choose to leave.’ As the writer rightly put it, ‘Can you imagine that ever being said about a man, that he was such a big meanie, he had such a shouty voice, that people under him had to leave their jobs?’32

  This prejudice against the authoritative female may have an influence on female advancement in other spheres of work. Recent research has suggested that women are still often rated more poorly than men in terms of professional standing and leadership qualities in many occupations, even when the evidence is on the side of the women, and though the evaluators always think they are being objective. For instance, researchers in Sweden have shown that in medicine – an area that women might see as pretty welcoming – women had to be far more qualified and productive than men to get postdoctoral fellowships. The supposedly objective process by which they were assessed was in fact a highly subjective process in which just being a woman was a severe handicap, since, ‘The peer reviewers overestimated male achievements and underestimated female performance.’ If they had previously worked with their assessors the women might be able to bring up their chances a bit, but: ‘Being of the female gender and lacking personal connections was a double handicap of such severity that it could hardly be compensated for by scientific productivity alone.’33 It is pretty certain that the men doing the assessments would have said – and probably believed – that they were being objective, but people are not always aware of how their judgements are affected by prejudice.34

  The resurgence of biological determinism, with its traditionalist views of women’s aptitudes, may be strengthening the operation of such stereotypes in certain fields. For instance, between 1997 and 2005 the proportion of women employed in technology industries fell from 27 per cent to 21 per cent.35 In an article in Management Today about this phenomenon, the reporter found influential people willing to put at least some of the inequality down to innate aptitudes. Anthony Seldon, headmaster of a large school and father of two girls, was quoted saying, ‘There are differences between boys and girls. Boys are more interested in computers than girls, and it often correlates with maths. It just so happens that girls are more interested in feelings and boys are more interested in things.’ No wonder a Microsoft survey conducted among women in information technology in 2007 concluded that some of them found their careers affected by sexism: ‘Some men discriminate against female colleagues by assuming they have less facility for deeply technical matters.’36

  Although many people would like to believe that women do not face discrimination at work any longer, throughout the professional world stereotypes against female leaders can hold women back. The psychologist Virginia Valian has examined much research into the ways that people relate to colleagues, and how they hire and promote others, and has found that this stereotype operates in subtle ways in many different situations. For instance, researchers once asked more than 250 managers to describe the typical characteristics of certain individuals – men in general, male managers, successful male managers, or women in general, female managers and successful female managers. They discovered that when ‘female’ was attached to managers or successful managers, there was a higher likelihood that they would be expected to be bitter, quarrelsome and selfish and less likely that they would be expected to have leadership ability.37

  And in a particularly intriguing piece of psychological research carried out in 1990, men and women who had been trained to act according to certain scripted patterns went into groups of participants who didn’t know that these men and women had been trained. The groups were given ten minutes to reach a decision on a certain task – ranking the usefulness of nine items to a person who had crash-landed on the moon. When the trained women took on the role of leader, they received many more negative facial reactions from the participants than the trained men received. Although they acted in an identical fashion as leaders, for the women, the negative reactions outweighed the positive, but for the men, the positive reactions outweighed the negative.38

  This imbalance, when played out in everyday life, may go to the heart of why some women may feel that seeking leadership roles in society is just too stressful, and why it is that women sometimes can’t understand why men are drawn to those roles. Is it that women just don’t receive the payoffs that men do in terms of positive reactions from colleagues and peers, however competent they are? After all, even if we were to get equal pay or equal promotion, this would be dust and ashes in our mouths if we weren’t to get that great feeling that having peer approval gives you – that warm sense of being liked and admired, of being a valued part of a team. Successful men may be able to count on that in a way that successful women cannot. And why should anyone want to be a loner even if they are at the top?

  Such research shows us that the persistence of stereotypes cannot simply be shattered by personal force of will; even if a woman trains herself to act just as a man would in her position, she may not be able to resist the force of expectations that consign her to a different role. For instance, women are often told that their low pay relative to men’s is their own fault: they don’t ask for higher pay often enough. It is true that women do not ask for higher pay as much as men do. As the researchers Linda Babcock and Sara Laschever explained in 2003, when they looked at a cohort of graduates from Carnegie Mellon University, they found that only 7 per cent of female students attempted to negotiate their initial salary offers compared to 57 per cent of men. Those who negotiated gained on average 7.4 per cent on their initial offers.39 But this failure of women to negotiate successfully is not just about their own decisions, it is also about the expectations around them. In another striking study, Linda Babcock and her colleagues ran a number of tests in which groups of people were asked to evaluate – after viewing videotapes or transcripts of interviews – men and women who were applying for a fictitious job, half of whom tried to negotiate their salary and half of whom did not. Babcock found that: ‘Men were always less willing to work with a woman who had attempted to negotiate than with a woman who did not. They always preferred to work with a woman who stayed mum.’ So women’s reluctance to negotiate is actually based on an accurate view of how they might be treated. ‘This isn’t about fixing the woman,’ Babcock said. ‘It isn’t about telling women, you need self-confidence or training. They are responding to incentives within the social environment.’40 The researchers theorised that the persistence of masculine and feminine stereotypes encourages people to assume that resources should be allocated asymmetrically. This means that women can appear inappropriately demanding if they attempt to negotiate for more money. So women enter a loop in which they fail to negotiate, and they fall behind in status.

  If we are honest about the ways in which women may be held back from seeking power, status and money not because of their innate desires or abilities, but because of the expectations in the culture around them, we begin to see again why it is important for us to look at how social factors still create inequality. We will never challenge the ways that women’s freedom is still constrained if we simply acquiesce in the idea that women are biologically programmed to fit in with the most limited stereotype of femininity.

  The stereotype of the female carer

  The search for greater equality does not just entail changes in women’s l
ives, and the existence of the backlash is not only holding women back from change. The narrative of biological determinism not only includes sweeping rhetoric about women’s lack of aptitude for high-intensity careers, but also moves into grand claims for men’s lack of aptitude for empathy. This stereotype can be seen to operate at a very early age, when little boys are expected to be aggressive and uninterested in social interaction. In later life it operates against men’s further movement into the domestic world, and is just as dangerous as the stereotype against authoritative women, because there can be no further progress towards equality unless men are prepared to do their fair share of home-making. A woman’s attempts to take a greater part in the world of paid work can so easily founder if there is nobody who will work with her to create a full and rewarding homelife. And as long as employers can assume that the typical worker is prepared to work any hours at any intensity while his wife picks up the slack at home, there will not be sufficient pressure to reshape the workplace in the way that is essential not just for greater equality, but also for greater happiness. Many women have written recently about their disillusionment with the notion that one can ‘have it all’, both a demanding job and a good home life. I agree that we should not be in thrall to the idea that paid work is all that gives life value. But the joys of family life are not just the responsibility of women, and it is strange to see how our culture seems to be retreating into the idea that men will never play a full part in creating those joys.