From Whistling Vivaldi, an amusing but more tragic than amusing demonstration of the power of identity stereotype cues.
[Paul Davies and Steve Spencer] had men and women college students watch a set of six television commercials, ostensibly as part of a media study. For half of these students, two of the commercials included women depicted in silly gender-stereotyped ways – as a co-ed extolling the party life at her university, for example – and for the other half the commercials had no gender content. After viewing the commercials, each student was taken across the hall to an ostensibly different study where, to help a graduate, they could work on as many verbal and math items as they wanted to. The results were clear. The women who had seen the stereotypical images of women in the earlier commercials chose fewer math problems to work on, performed worse on the ones they did choose, and reported being less interested in math-related college majors and careers than women who had not seen those commercials. [p 144]
I suppose part of why I find that faintly amusing (albeit far more tragic) is because that’s exactly what I have always thought about that kind of thing – exposure to images of women being stupid on tv and in movies. I’ve always thought it makes us stupid. It’s almost funny to find it so tidily confirmed.
But since there’s so god damn much of the kind of thing, it’s way more tragic. Thank you very much “Real Housewives of Akron” and “Millionaire Pimp” and “Girls Behaving Idiotically” and “ZOMG It’s a Wedding Dress” and “Sam Has Four Wives.”
Hey – if you’re a woman, I just made you stupider.
duh wot?
I’ve also been reading Fine’s Delusions of Gender, and I wonder a bit about how broad the spread is. OK, stereotype threat lowers averages, but do some people react differently? What’s the standard deviation on that change? (Is it normally distributed?) My personal attitude at uni tended to be along the lines of “Fuck you, you girls-can’t-do-logic moron, I just got high distinctions in my advanced logic and pure maths classes, and now I’m tutoring you in your maths-for-dummies class.”
To find that out you’d have to read the studies themselves – the book is for a general audience (like me) so of course doesn’t say a word about standard deviation.
Steele and Fine both go into this whole fuck you attitude thing though. I have a version of that too, but the trouble is, the effort of saying fuck you itself diverts mental energy from the task at hand. It’s the strong students who are most affected. It’s all very depressing. (On the other hand it’s also encouraging, because it disconfirms all the “well it turns out they’re stupid after all” conclusions.)
There was another study some time ago (sorry, I’m drawing a blank as to where to find it) where they had college applicants write a standardised test. The only difference between the control group and the experimental condition was at the top of the test, the control just put their name and date of birth, where the experimental condition asked also for race.
African America students who were part of the experimental condition scored significantly lower on the test than the control group. When presented with their results from the test, they were more likely to accept the results and express the belief that they were not well-suited for college.
Priming does some horrible things.
The study is linked through the wiki page here.
This actually reminds me of a study I read last year, where men and women exhibited more misogynistic attitudes after listening to hip hop music – even hip hop music that had no actual misogynistic content, such as the word “bitches”. The point being, misogyny is so ingrained in hip hop, that hip hop no longer needs to actually be misogynistic to encourage those attitudes.
I wonder, considering the three most relied upon tropes for women in advertising are, sexy, stupid or motherish (or a combination thereof), whether or not removing these stereotypes from the adverts would actually remove the association, whenever a woman was featured in an advert.
I have daughters and although I long since got rid of the TV, plenty of TV & movies now stream over the internet, and these attitudes kind of leak in from everywhere. I would love to hear about antidotes (except sports- which I know works for many girls, just not these two).
Re. the F-You attitude, my mother (who has never said F-You in her life) decided to be lawyer when her lawyer-father told her that women make lousy lawyers. I’ve always liked that story.
I find photos like these fascinating, particularly the ones which have a cast professionally posed for a promo shot or an advertisement.
The one which opened my eyes was from a few years back — I’ve forgotten the title now, but it was hosted by a black woman, and featured women competing to marry wealthy men.
The men were on the right of the poster, looking tall, suave, handsome, and bored, rarely making eye contact.
The women were on the left side of the poster, blowing kisses, striking poses, doing whatever they could to attract the men.
The one thing every single woman in the image had in common (including the host) was that she was posed in some manner which drew the eye to her hips.
Whether she was bent over, hip thrown out, hand on hip, leaning, wearing a belt, whatever it was, every. single. woman. was drawing attention to her hips.
And not one man was doing anything remotely similar. All the men were deliberately looking away from both the women and the camera.
Now go back and look at the three photos in the post again. The top one is the least professional, and has the least hip highlighting. The bottom two have been “styled,” and you can see that almost every single female is doing something to draw your attention to her hips.
Once you start deconstructing the images, they lose a lot of their persuasive power.
… if you’re a woman, I just made you stupider.
Field research usually indicates that images of sexy women most often make men stupider.
Fortunately for me, kinda, those pictures of over-packaged, -cosmeticized, & -attitudinized human females only qualify as erotic insofar as they do have somewhat-identifiable women in there, buried under all that corporate crud. Even the five letters w_o_m_e_n would probably serve better in distracting my frontal lobes – but maybe that’s just me…
What if you’re a lesbian though? Have I just been made doubly stupider? 😉
The whole problem with ennui about TV, movies etc. is that this is what most people apparently want to watch, and if you don’t, you can just turn it off. (Which is why me and my wife don’t have a TV any more.) Yes, this whole garbage makes me despair, but well – that is what sells, there is no way around it. Maybe it is time to face that this is simply the humankind we have to deal with.
By the way, there is an advert for a good cause on the BBC (helping to get the elderly onto the internet, called Give an Hour) that has the classic “even granny can do it now” motif, that I would not have noticed without this blog – thank you Ophelia! Hmm after a quick search I couldn’t find it but did find this:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/school_report/school_report_first_click/9617635.stm
Which does the same thing. Infuriating.
I would urge caution in stating it that way, or saying the results of the study confirm exactly what you’ve always thought. The question psychologists always ask after getting a result like this is How long does it last? They primed the participants with stereotypes and then found a change in their behavior immediately afterwards. Did the priming have an effect on the women after they left the lab? For how long? Also, can women escape the effects of the priming if they know about it and recognize the stereotypes as they see them (regardless of whether they have a ‘fuck you’ attitude or not)?
There are many questions still unanswered here. What this study found was that women who were exposed to stereotypes, who possibly didn’t recognize or think about them as they saw them, had less interest in math problems than verbal problems and performed worse on them immediately after viewing the stereotypes. If you call this result “Stereotypes make women stupider,” you’re giving people a take-home message that is many times simpler than what the study showed.
It’s really, really, really not that simple. People can only watch what’s presented to them, what they’re made aware of. I’ve known countless people who watched pretty awful movies & TV until I convinced them to watch the good stuff, whereupon they stopped wasting so much time with the garbage. The fact that something is popular doesn’t really tell you much, other than that it’s popular. If they stopped making garbage reality TV, do you really think the people who watched those shows would just stop watching TV? Because I really doubt it.
I realized later that I’d forgotten to say the effect is temporary. That’s what the test is testing, after all – whether being presented with a stereotype makes a difference.
On the other hand cues are pervasive, so it seems likely that this kind of surge of stereotype goes on all the time. One minute you’re cruising along thinking you’re just another human like anyone else, and the next minute you’re reminded you’re [whatever the salient stereotype is]. There’s a chapter on that in the book.
What I’m expressing here is nothing to do with ennui about tv. It’s the very opposite of that.
Which gives even more power to advertisers and networks, cue death spiral.
My family watches whatever garbage is on the main networks, because they can’t be bothered to navigate hundreds of channels to LOOK for anything better. I have higher standards, but it took a lot of work and note-taking to locate and identify the few shows I actually want to see. Now I have a channel/show cheat sheet taped next to the TV.
These days, I get all my “tv” and the majority of my movies from Netflix. I didn’t even notice when the hdtv switch occurred.
When I talk with a friend and they mention a movie or tv show, I look it up on IMDB and see what the overall rating is. From experience I have found that I generally don’t enjoy movies that are rated below 6.8-7.0 (depending on the genre). Then if it looks interesting, I’ll click on the “parent content advisory” link, because it will list anything anyone might find objectionable – I want to know if it’s rated PG-13/R due to language, violence, sex, or what.
This takes just a few minutes to come to a decision whether to add it to my queue. If Netflix has it for streaming I add it to my Instant queue, otherwise it goes onto my DVD queue.
Then when I’m folding laundry or whatever, I turn on the TV and can watch a new episode of a show, watch a documentary I know I’ll like, or start a movie. Plus I’ll know whether it’s appropriate to watch if my kids are in the room. *And* I don’t have to deal with commercials!
My kids (age 12 and 14) have been exposed to a wide range of shows and movies thanks to Netflix – from old Dr Who and Twilight Zone to Deep Space Nine and BSG, and Night of the Living Dead and Alien, and X-Men, and BBC documentaries and Nova and Mythbusters. They don’t have to have everything be flash-bang and hyper, and they don’t mind when I point out stereotypes and talk about how societal attitudes have changed over the years.
TV isn’t all bad. One of the best things on television is Time Team (the original British version, not the dreadful American version). In it women are depicted as equal in all respects to the men, both as field archeologists and as subject experts. Furthermore, the show is presented as strict reality. Nothing is staged, nothing is done as a retake. I suspect that some of the more light-hearted events may have been rehearsed, but the serious business is shown as it really happened. Occasionally important developments are introduced as “Just as we finished filming that last sequence such-and-such happened.” They don’t even do re-enactments, if the cameras aren’t rolling when it happens, we don’t get to see it.
So, while fiction may show women as air-heads, here is a program showing women in real life with a bimbo factor of zero.
I have become more aware of gender stereotypes on television as my daughter gets older.
Last year, her teacher asked her what she wanted to be when she grew up, and she said….”Pretty”. My wife thought that was hilarious, but I didn’t.
My daughter lives in a world of Princesses, Prom Queens, and Pretenses.
I hope these are the fleeting fancies of female fantasy-just as my childhood dreams involved a uniform and a weapon, though there exists a key distinction.
It seems to me that my role models had tangible, objective value- my daughters self image seems entirely bound to transient, subjective peer evaluation.
I’d like to hope my fears are not a forgone conclusion, that I can raise a daughter who invests in herself- but in a world where a man is a leader and a woman is a bitch- it seems the world is prepared to merely let her pick her poison.
Eek – I hate that whole princess thing. I sometimes (in fact all too often) notice groups of schoolchildren in which there’s not one girl who isn’t wearing pink. George, you might enjoy the book Cinderella Ate My Daughter.
@Keith Harwood
“So, while fiction may show women as air-heads, here is a program showing women in real life with a bimbo factor of zero.”
Mythbusters too. Kari might be the only woman on the show (now), and she certainly has the looks for the “dumb broad” part, but she has skills. Welds, sculpts, shoots, mixes gun cotton, etc.
And Scottie, who’s unfortunately not with the show anymore, was a total gear head who wore engine grease like makeup.
It’s sad, really, that there’s so few like them.
No, actually you just made me want to barf. Why are these women wearing such ugly clothes that don’t suit them at all?
Don’t go walking through Toys R Us. Even the “for girls” birthday cards are covered in pink. I have a client who likes walking through there, so I’m sure I’ll be there again soon. Maybe I’ll get lucky, and spot something “for girls” that’s not doused in pink.
Something fun: Elizabeth Blackwell was the first woman to graduate from medical school in the US. Supposedly, she was admitted partly as a joke — it was thought that her application was a hoax. According to the textbook I first saw this in, she went on to graduate with top honors.
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