Living Dolls: The Return of Sexism (29 page)

What effect does the popularity of false ideas of biological determinism have on the power of stereotypes in everyday life? The researchers at Yale who looked at links between political
conservatism and biological determinism in the media found that when readers are exposed to biological narratives, they became more inclined themselves to endorse stereotypes about how men and women should behave. These researchers gave participants articles which explained sex differences either by reference to biology – evolutionary programming or brain structure – or by reference to society – socialisation and expectations. The effect was striking. Those participants who read the article with biological explanations went on to score more highly in a questionnaire that asked them to endorse stereotypes such as women being more nurturing and men more arrogant. It also led them to answer more negatively when asked if they thought people could change their behaviour. This was the case even if the article was putting forward a sex difference in which women were ‘better’ than men.
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So even when we are told that girls have, say, ‘superior’ language skills we may be encouraged into a fatalistic view of sex differences that discourages us from seeing individuals’ – even our own – true flexibility and potential for change.

Such research shows that poor use and reporting of science matters more than we might think; it’s not just that bad science gets things wrong, but that it can affect our beliefs and therefore our behaviour.
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What is fashionably called stereotype threat we might call social conditioning, or sexism, but whatever words we use to describe this phenomenon, it is time to become more alert to the impact the new fashion for biological determinism might have on strengthening stereotypes in everyday life and therefore on holding back the possibility of greater equality.

Because there is still an unfinished revolution in our society. Inequality is still the reality. Men still have much more political and economic power than women, and women still do much more work that is unpaid and unrecognised at home. Although in theory glass ceilings have been broken everywhere, and women have flooded into jobs once seen as the preserve of men,
the upper echelons of businesses and professions and politics are still masculine. For instance, in the law, 49 per cent of the lowest rank of judges (deputy district judges and the like) are women; but only 10 per cent of high court judges.
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In 2007, women made up just 11 per cent of directors at FTSE 100 companies, 12 per cent of senior police officers, 14 per cent of local authority council leaders, 14 per cent of editors of national newspapers and 20 per cent of MPs.
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Meanwhile, women do the bulk of unpaid domestic work, even if they are working full-time. A woman who works full-time does an average of twenty-three hours of domestic work a week; a man who works full-time does an average of eight hours of domestic work each week.
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This has a huge knock-on effect on their rewards in the workplace. When men and women become parents, the gap between their experiences looms particularly large. While childless women earn about 9 per cent less than men, women with children earn about 22 per cent less than their male colleagues, even if they work full-time.
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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.’
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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”.’
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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.
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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,
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and the German chancellor Angela Merkel’s ‘unstylish haircut, frumpish appearance’.
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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’.
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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.”’
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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 computer 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?’
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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.’
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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.
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