school (every child in the study took both tests).26 One test evaluated
each child’s general ability. The other, Rosenthal and Jacobson told the
children’s teachers, could predict which children were about to experi-
ence an “intellectual growth spurt”—a substantial leap forward in their
capabilities. The psychologists explained to the teachers that “all chil-
dren show hills, plateaus, and valleys in their scholastic progress,” and
that they had developed the Harvard Test of Inflected Acquisition (or
the Harvard TIA) in order to identify those children who were about to
“show an inflection point or ‘spurt’ in the near future.”27 After adminis-
tering both tests, Rosenthal and Jacobson gave each teacher a list of the
children in his or her class who they said were about to experience a
leap forward in their learning abilities.
72
N I C E G I R L S D O N ’ T A S K
A year and a half later, the psychologists returned to the same school
and readministered the test of general ability. When they compared the
new results with the results from the general ability test administered
at their previous visit, the children the researchers had said were about
to “spurt” had improved more than the others. While the “nonspurters”
had gained an average of only 8.42 points on the test, the preidentified
“spurters” had gained an average of 12.22 points in general learning
ability—a difference of 50 percent. In addition, the teachers gave the
“spurters” higher grades in reading and reported that they were “happier
and more intellectually curious” than their peers.
The significant detail here is that the Harvard TIA was not a real test.
It was designed to convince the teachers that the kids were taking a real
test. But the researchers never scored the test or processed any results
from it. Instead, they randomly chose 20 percent of the children and
gave their names to the teachers. The change in the children’s scores
on the real test, the test of general ability, revealed the huge impact of
the teachers’ expectations on the performance of those children whose
names were on the list. Because the teachers expected those children to
“get smarter,” they did.
The researchers speculated that the teachers paid more attention to
the targeted students, expressed more enthusiasm when they did well,
encouraged them more, and generally made them feel special—all be-
haviors that built the students’ confidence, increased their motivation
to do well, and led to the leap forward in their achievement.28 When
children whose names were not on the list did well, the teachers were
less likely to notice or respond with special encouragement, thereby
missing opportunities to build their self-confidence and motivation.
Since this landmark study (which would probably be considered un-
ethical if administered today), a large body of psychological research
has confirmed that people typically comply with the expectations others
have of them—expectations that can be expressed in both overt and
subtle ways.29 And several studies have confirmed that expectations
based on gender can be particularly powerful.30
Elaine, 55, a U.S. District Court judge, provides an example of how
adults unthinkingly communicate their differing expectations of
women and men. Elaine and two other women were appointed at the
same time to her district court, which has a total of 13 judges and had
previously been all-male. During her first week on the bench, Elaine
and one of the other female judges participated in a meeting with several
of the male judges. As Elaine tells it, “It was a very important meeting,
73
C H A P T E R 3
and everybody was talking, and we were talking, raising our hands and
contributing to the conversation, and the chief judge was summarizing
what everyone said. And he said, ‘Well, Judge Josephson said this, Judge
Harris said this, and Phoebe said this, and Elaine said that.’ ” Elaine
and the other female judge at the meeting exchanged looks—they both
noticed immediately that the chief judge was calling the men by their
titles and the women by their first names. She said, “I don’t think he
meant to demean us, but it was clear that he thought of us in different
ways, and that comes across. And we thought of ourselves in different ways. I think it’s hard not be treated that way without having it rub
off.” The chief judge had inadvertently revealed that, like most people,
he thinks of men as “assertive, dominant, decisive, ambitious, and in-
strumental,” and therefore deserving of being called “judge,” a title that
confers the right to assert oneself and exercise personal power. He also
showed that he probably thinks of women as more “warm, expressive,
nurturing, emotional, and friendly,” and therefore more appropriately
addressed by their “friendlier” first names.
In Elaine’s experience, this was only one of numerous times in her
career when she realized how other people’s beliefs could influence her
behavior. Struggling with this reality, she learned that there was “a range
of roles that I could play, and I had to work with not only what I looked
like physically [as a woman]; I had to work with the roles that society
was going to ascribe to me . . . and they changed over time, . . . modified
both by my age and by society’s expectations of who I was. You could
push to a point, but you couldn’t go beyond that if you meant to be
successful in the world.”
Simply ignoring a stereotype or refusing to behave as expected
doesn’t solve the problem, in other words. Suppose, for example, that
a man believes that women make bad leaders. This man may express
doubt and distrust whenever he encounters a woman in a leadership
position. His response may range from rolling his eyes to disobeying
her outright; in either case, his expectation, thus communicated, may
shake her confidence. Understanding that she’s not “supposed” to be
a good leader, she may behave in more uncertain, less capable ways,
stumbling over instructions she gives to subordinates, questioning her
own decisions, and “leading” less capably.
If she doesn’t let him “shake” her and persists in leading capably and
well, this may actually antagonize him, with unpleasant consequences
(we discuss how women can be punished for violating gender stereo-
74
N I C E G I R L S D O N ’ T A S K
types in the next chapter). Psychologists have also shown that when
people encounter evidence inconsistent with their beliefs, they tend to
ignore it.31 So, the man who thinks women make bad leaders may
completely disregard a situation in which a woman conducts herself
effectively as a leader. (Similarly, the expectation that women won’t
push on their own behalf can make people ignore or undermine them
when they do.)
Even memory can be affected by stereotypes, causing this man to
remember every instance of poor leadership by a woman and forget
events inc
onsistent with his belief, such as a woman leading exception-
ally well. The man might even “remember” events consistent with the
stereotype that did not actually occur because people often “create”
memories that conform to their beliefs, memory researchers have
found.32 A final factor is that this same man might shy away from putting
women in leadership roles, thereby limiting his opportunities to ob-
serve women behaving in ways inconsistent with his belief, as well as
limiting women’s opportunities to work on their leadership skills. All
of these processes reduce the chances that his belief will be challenged
and revised.
Regardless of the mechanisms by which these gender roles are per-
petuated, it seems unlikely that our conceptions about gender roles will
change quickly. Although the last 30 years have seen a marked rise in
the proportion of women in the paid labor force, perceptions of women
as other-oriented and men as self-oriented have remained fairly stable.33
One study by the negotiation researchers Laura Kray, Leigh Thompson,
and Adam Galinsky, published in 2001, asked undergraduates to write
essays discussing who has the advantage in negotiations, men or
women. By a large majority, the students’ responses confirmed prevail-
ing gender stereotypes, describing men as assertive, strong, and able to
stand firm against compromise, and women as emotional, relationship-
oriented, accommodating, and attuned to feelings.34 In other words,
young adults today hold many of the same beliefs about typically male
and female behaviors that their parents and grandparents held. Before
these beliefs can be changed, it would seem, we will need to find ways
to change both the roles women play in society and our widely shared
ideas about acceptable behavior for women. Teaching women to assert
their needs and wishes more and teaching society to accept women who
ask for what they want may be one of those ways.
75
C H A P T E R 3
Why Don’t Women Resist These Norms?
Existing gender roles and stereotypes hardly work to the material or
economic advantage of women. Why then, don’t women rebel against
them? One explanation, perhaps the most straightforward, contends
that socialization does such a thorough job of teaching little girls their
proper role that by the time they reach adulthood, they believe that their
gender-appropriate impulses and behavior—such as being nurturing,
friendly, and selfless—are intrinsic expressions of their personalities
rather than learned behaviors.35 They may also believe that these behav-
iors are attractive and valuable, which of course they are. But so are
many behaviors that boys are taught, such as exercising initiative and
sticking up for themselves.
Elaine, the judge described earlier, is unusual in her awareness of
the impact of gender stereotypes on her behavior and her sense of her-
self; most women, researchers suspect, don’t realize how much they are
influenced by social expectations. The Stanford social psychologist John
Jost suggests that “women in general are relatively unaware of their
status as an oppressed group,” and consequently, “hold many beliefs
that are consonant with their own oppression.” He also suggests that
what he calls “gender socialization practices” are “so thorough in their
justification of inequality” that girls and women end up believing that
the existing system of inequality and discrimination is appropriate and
right.36 In other words, “members of oppressed groups internalize as-
pects of their oppression, coming to believe in the legitimacy of their
own inferiority.”37
To understand how this works, consider a girl who has been taught
that girls don’t make good scientists. Believing this, she may try less
hard at science in school (to avoid failing at something in which she has
invested her energies—and her ego). Or she might become interested in
other subjects at which she feels she can excel. In this way, she never
encounters evidence to dispute what she’s been taught—and she never
learns that she can be good at science if she chooses to be. Since research
suggests that evidence inconsistent with a previously held belief is fre-
quently ignored or underweighted,38 her belief that she is not good at
science may even persist in the face of disconfirming evidence. If she
does well on a science test, for example, she may ascribe this to luck
rather than talent, or find some other excuse (such as dismissing it as
76
N I C E G I R L S D O N ’ T A S K
an easy test). Thus, traditional beliefs are passed down, generation to
generation.
Linda had almost this exact experience, except that she was lucky
enough to stumble into a situation that tested her unfounded beliefs
about her abilities. As a child, like many girls, she thought she wasn’t
very good at math. She can’t identify any specific comment from a
parent or a teacher, or any other experiences that might account for
this assumption, but being a girl she assumed that math just wasn’t
her subject, and no one tried to convince her otherwise. In high
school, when some of her friends took calculus, she thought it would
be too difficult for her. She started out in college planning to become a
dancer, but after an injury forced her to stop dancing she became inter-
ested in economics. Economics at the undergraduate level, at least at
her school, didn’t involve much math, and Linda found that she was
very good at it—good enough to go to graduate school in the subject.
In graduate school, however, she discovered that economics at the
Ph.D. level is almost all math, and very challenging math at that. But, it turned out, Linda was good at that too—she just didn’t know this
until circumstances disproved her conditioned assumptions about her
own limitations.
The power of what John Jost calls “gender socialization practices” to
convince women of “the legitimacy of their own inferiority” also mani-
fests itself in what has been termed “the imposter syndrome.” Many
women who have ventured into fields that were previously closed to
them suffer from “a deep sense of inadequacy that is objectively un-
founded,” the sociologist Gerhard Sonnert reports in Who Succeeds in
Science: The Gender Dimension.39 Among a large group of former doc-
toral-level fellows, all of whom won prestigious postdoctorate awards
early in their careers, Sonnert reports that 70 percent of the men but
only 52 percent of the women considered their scientific ability to be
above average. This discrepancy has been documented in other fields
as well.40 Studies of women graduate students show that they have
much lower levels of self-confidence than their male peers even when
their grades are just as good or better.41 Having advanced far up the
rungs of a ladder that women are not supposed to climb, or achieved
significant success in an area in which women aren’t supposed to excel,
many women secretly harbor the feeling that they’re just �
��faking it” and
that their inadequacy will soon be discovered.
In Schoolgirls: Young Women, Self-Esteem, and the Confidence Gap,
Peggy Orenstein describes this feeling shared by so many women: “In
77
C H A P T E R 3
spite of all of our successes, in spite of the fact that we have attained
the superficial ideal of womanhood held out to our generation, we feel
unsure, insecure, inadequate.” As early as her college years, she writes,
“I became paralyzed during the writing of my senior thesis, convinced
that my fraudulence was about to be unmasked. Back then, I went to
my adviser and told her of the fears that were choking me. ‘You feel
like an impostor?’ she asked. ‘Don’t worry about it. All smart women
feel that way.’ ”42 Secretly convinced that generalizations about women’s
abilities are true, women refrain from rebelling openly against those
generalizations for fear that their weakness and inferiority will be ex-
posed if they do.
Women also don’t resist gender norm constraints because, in many
cases, they are oblivious to their power and believe these norms have
no impact on their own behavior. Faye Crosby and Stacy Ropp have
shown that “it is difficult for most people to recognize personal injus-
tices.”43 They also report that women are not likely to take action when
they see their group—women—discriminated against but don’t feel
personally mistreated themselves. A woman might think, “Why should
I rebel against something that doesn’t affect me or how I behave?” A
selection of quotations from short profiles of women lawyers in an issue
of the New York Times Magazine devoted to “Women and Power” illus-
trates this point well: “I’m absolutely against blaming any type of failure
on outside circumstances. I believe that you create possibility for your-
self. I think the way people are treated follows naturally from how they
perceive themselves”; “I don’t have any obstacles, so if I don’t get to the
top, it will be because of my own personal choices. There’s no discrimi-
nation except for the kind we face within ourselves”; “I think if you
know your stuff you’re going to be fine.”44
Although the self-confidence of these women is admirable and will
surely serve them well, their optimism is misplaced for two reasons.
Women Don't Ask Page 13
