Language may undermine women in science and tech
August 3, 2020
Science Daily/Carnegie Mellon University
Despite decades of positive messaging to encourage women and girls to pursue education tracks and careers in STEM, women continue to fall far below their male counterparts in these fields. A new study at Carnegie Mellon University examined 25 languages to explore the gender stereotypes in language that undermine efforts to support equality across STEM career paths. The results are available in the August 3rd issue of Nature Human Behavior.
Molly Lewis, special faculty at CMU and her research partner, Gary Lupyan, associate professor at University of Wisconsin-Madison, set out to examine the effect of language on career stereotypes by gender. They found that implicit gender associations are strongly predicted by the language we speak. Their work suggests that linguistic associations may be causally related to people's implicit judgement of what women can accomplish.
"Young children have strong gender stereotypes as do older adults, and the question is where do these biases come from," said Lewis, first author on the study. No one has looked at implicit language -- simple language that co-occurs over a large body of text -- that could give information about stereotypical norms in our culture across different languages."
In general, the team examined how words co-occur with women compared to men. For example, how often is 'woman' associated with 'home,' 'children' and 'family,' where as 'man' was associated with 'work,' 'career' and 'business.'
"What's not obvious is that a lot of information that is contained in language, including information about cultural stereotypes, [occurs not as] direct statements but in large-scale statistical relationships between words," said Lupyan, senior author on the study. "Even without encountering direct statements, it is possible to learn that there is stereotype embedded in the language of women being better at some things and men at others."
They found that languages with a stronger embedded gender association are more clearly associated with career stereotypes. They also found that a positive relationship between gender-
marked occupation terms and the strength of these gender stereotypes.
Previous work has shown that children begin to ingrain gender stereotypes in their culture by the age of two. The team examined statistics regarding gender associations embedded in 25 languages and related the results to an international dataset of gender bias (Implicit Association Test).
Surprisingly, they found that the median age of the country influences the study results. Countries with a larger older population have a stronger bias in career-gender associations.
"The consequences of these results are pretty profound," said Lewis. "The results suggest that if you speak a language that is really biased then you are more likely to have a gender stereotype that associates men with career and women with family."
She suggests children's books be written and designed to not have gender-biased statistics. These results also have implications for algorithmic fairness research aimed at eliminating gender bias in computer algorithms.
"Our study shows that language statistics predict people's implicit biases -- languages with greater gender biases tend to have speakers with greater gender biases," Lupyan said. "The results are correlational, but that the relationship persists under various controls [and] does suggest a causal influence."
Lewis notes that the Implicit Association Test used in this study has been criticized for low reliability and limited external validity. She stresses that additional work using longitudinal analyses and experimental designs is necessary to explore language statistics and implicit associations with gender stereotypes.
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/08/200803120130.htm
Women CEOs judged more harshly than men for corporate ethical failures
Female leaders receive less negativity for general business failures, study says
October 24, 2019
Science Daily/American Psychological Association
People are less likely to support an organization after an ethical failure if the business is led by a woman, according to a study published by the American Psychological Association. However, organizations led by women endure less negative backlash for competence failures than those headed by men.
"Our study found that consumers' trust in, and willingness to support, an organization after a failure varied based on the gender of the organization's leader and the type of incident," said Nicole Votolato Montgomery, PhD, of the University of Virginia and lead author of the study. "Women incur greater penalties for ethical transgressions because of persistent gender stereotypes that tend to categorize women as having more communal traits than men, such as being more likable, sensitive and supportive of others. Even in leadership settings, women are still expected to be more communal than their male counterparts."
The study was published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.
Across three experiments, Montgomery and co-author Amanda P. Cowen, DBA, examined how gender would influence perceptions of female-led and male-led organizations after experiencing a competence failure, such as a product flaw, or an ethical failure, such as if the product flaw was known but not disclosed to the public for a long period of time.
In the first experiment, 512 participants read a business news article about an auto manufacturer and then filled out a survey about their intent to buy a vehicle from the company. One-third of the participants read about an ethical failure, one-third read about a competence failure and the final third only read the company description. Afterward, the participants were asked how likely they were to purchase a car from the company the next time they were in the market for a vehicle and reported their trust in the organization (e.g., "I feel that XYZ automobiles is very dependable/undependable, very competent/incompetent or of low integrity/high integrity").
"When participants were told that the company had previously been made aware of a fuel sensor problem and failed to take immediate action, an ethical failure, they reported less intent to purchase from the company when the CEO was a woman than when the CEO was a man," said Montgomery. "However, when participants were told that the company was previously unaware of the product issue, a competence failure, they reported greater intent to buy the products when the CEO was a woman than when the CEO was a man."
The purchase intentions for the group that read only the company description did not vary based on the CEO's gender.
The second experiment further examined how gender stereotypes influence consumers' judgments by altering how female and male CEOs were described. The researchers added descriptions of the CEO either to highlight communal traits that are typically associated with females (e.g., "helpful, sensitive to the needs of employees and customers, able to listen carefully to customers' concerns") or agentic traits that are typically associated with males (e.g., "skilled, strongly independent, able to work well under pressure").
The 416 participants in this study read the same news article as in the previous experiment and completed the same survey questions about their buying intentions and trust in the company. In this experiment, participants also were asked to report their attitudes toward the brand, their response to online advertisements for the company, if they would recommend the company to others and the effectiveness of the company's leader.
Similar to the previous experiment, when participants read about an ethical failure where the CEO was described using traits consistent with stereotypes (e.g., the female leader was described as being communal and the male leader was described as being agentic), participants were less likely to buy from the company led by the female CEO. In contrast, when the CEO was described using traits inconsistent with stereotypes (e.g., the male leader was described as being communal and female leader was described as being agentic), the participants said they were less likely to buy from the male-led company than the female-led company in the aftermath of an ethical failure, the researchers said.
"When leaders are described in ways that reinforce stereotypes, we continue to find that people penalize female-led organizations more for ethical failures, but we can reduce these penalties for female-led organizations by highlighting agentic traits of their leaders," said Cowen.
For the final experiment, Montgomery and Cowen explored whether consumers' judgments would change if the women CEOs led businesses that operated in industries that are viewed as more stereotypically feminine -- in this case, a child products company, versus the automotive company.
Participants indicated they would be less likely to purchase from a female-led organization in both stereotypically male (e.g., automotive) and stereotypically female (e.g., child products) industries after an ethical failure, according to the researchers. However, participants' responses to competence failures differed depending on the industry.
"In the auto industry, which is typically viewed as more male, participants penalized female-led organizations less than male-led organizations for competence failures," Cowan said. "However, the opposite was true for a child products company. In that setting, participants who read about a competence failure penalized female-led organizations more than male-led organizations. This further demonstrates how gender stereotypes influence our expectations of leaders and their organizations."
Montgomery and Cowen believe their findings may have implications for leaders' career outcomes.
"Organizational performance affects how leaders are evaluated, how they are compensated and ultimately, whether they retain their positions," Montgomery said. "Our research suggests that when ethical failures occur, female leaders may aid their organizations' recovery efforts by exhibiting agentic traits that are more consistent with male stereotypes."
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/10/191024093604.htm
Women now seen as equally as or more competent than men
Polling data suggest stereotypes have significantly changed since 1940s
July 18, 2019
Science Daily/American Psychological Association
Women have come a long way in the United States over the last 70 years, to the point where they are now seen as being as competent as men, if not more so, according to research published by the American Psychological Association.
"Challenging traditional claims that stereotypes of women and men are fixed or rigid, our study joins others in finding stereotypes to be flexible to changes in social roles," said Alice Eagly, PhD, of Northwestern University and lead author on the study. "As the roles of women and men have changed since the mid-20th century, so have beliefs about their attributes."
The research was published in American Psychologist, APA's flagship journal.
Eagly and her coauthors conducted a meta-analysis of 16 nationally representative public opinion polls involving more than 30,000 U.S. adults from 1946 to 2018. They looked at three types of traits -- communion (i.e., compassion, sensitivity), agency (i.e., ambition, aggression), and competence (i.e., intelligence, creativity) -- and whether participants thought each trait was truer of women or men or equally true of both.
Competence stereotypes changed dramatically over time. For example, in one 1946 poll, only 35% of those surveyed thought men and women were equally intelligent, and of those who believed there was a difference, more thought men were the more competent sex. In contrast, in one 2018 poll, 86% believed men and women were equally intelligent, 9% believed women were more intelligent and only 5% believed men were more intelligent.
Communal stereotypes viewing women as more compassionate and sensitive than men strengthened over time. In contrast, agency stereotypes viewing men as more ambitious and aggressive than women did not significantly change over time.
"These current stereotypes should favor women's employment because competence is, of course, a job requirement for virtually all positions. Also, jobs increasingly reward social skills, making women's greater communion an additional advantage," said Eagly. "On a less positive note, most leadership roles require more agency than communion. Therefore, the lesser agency ascribed to women than men is a disadvantage in relation to leadership positions."
Eagly theorized that the considerable change in competence beliefs derives, in part, from the changing roles of men and women. Women's labor force participation has increased from 32% in 1950 to 57% in 2018, while men's participation has fallen from 82% to 69%. Women also now earn more bachelor's, master's and doctoral degrees than do men, unlike decades ago.
"Our interpretation of these findings is that women's increasing labor force participation and education underlie the increase in their perceived competence, but that occupational segregation and the division of domestic roles underlie the findings for communion and agency," she said.
As women entered paid employment in large numbers, their jobs remained concentrated in occupations that reward social skills or offer contribution to society. Women also spend approximately twice as much time on domestic work and child care as men on average, according to Eagly. In contrast, men are concentrated in leadership roles and in occupations that require physical strength, competition, interaction with things, and analytical, mathematical and technical skills.
"Observation of these stark differences in the typical roles of women and men causes people to ascribe different traits to them, as shown in other research studies. Gender stereotypes thus reflect the social position of women and men in society but change when this social position shifts," she said.
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/07/190718112532.htm