Anti-Woman Bias Infects Liberal Bosses

From: Raise Your Hand If You're A Woman in Science,
Virginia Valian, Washington Post, January 30, 2005 (edited)


Researchers asked people to rate men and women
VPs in an aircraft company as to:
a) competence
b) likeability

The raters were told that:
a) half the VP's were great performers.
b) the other half had not had a performance
    review yet so their competence was unknown.

MEN MORE COMPETENT

ferraro cute
When the raters received no information about a person's performance they rated the man as more competent than the woman, and rated them as equally likeable.

When told that the person was very competent, they rated men and women as equally competent.

SUCCESSFUL WOMEN LESS LIKEABLE

Ferraro Angry
But both men and women raters saw the successful women as less likeable than the men.

There's a lot of research like this but it is not well-known so it has not had much effect.

Genius blogger, Businesspundit, offers a different explanation
as to why research on bias has no effect.

The results of the research on bias are well-known.
But everyone assumes that it pertains to someone else.

Inotherwords, research on bias is beaten by
the very bias it researches
.
 

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