Tuesday, February 23, 2016

Sexism as "Under the Conscious"? Hmm, Cute.

"After surveying roughly 1,700 students across three biology courses, they found young men consistently gave each other more credit than they awarded to their just-as-savvy female classmates. 
Men over-ranked their peers by three-quarters of a GPA point, according to the study, published this month in the journal PLOS ONE. In other words, if Johnny and Susie both had A's, they’d receive equal applause from female students — but Susie would register as a B student in the eyes of her male peers, and Johnny would look like a rock star. 
'Something under the conscious is going on,' Grunspan said. 'For 18 years, these [young men] have been socialized to have this bias.'
Being male, he added, “is some kind of boost.” At least in the eyes of other men."
Unfortunately, my perusal (n=1) of comments following various articles about this study suggest that something very much above the conscious might also be a factor.

Now, obviously, I know the study's authors didn't base their study on Internet comments, but I'm troubled by the going out of one's way to not acknowledge that we live in a society with very explicit biases against women's competence.

That is, some men are just fucking sexist and very intentionally only see other men as their intellectual peers. This happens in college. It happens in workplaces. It happens in politics. It happens everywhere. Constantly assuming the best about men who hold such biases seems a leeeeetle, shall I say, "politically correct," yes?

Echidne breaks the study down, if you're interested. And is maybe nicer about it than me. My fucks to give about being nice about this shit have run out, officially.



No comments: