Keeping up appearances - how women are less likely to be hired than men

[msrisotto]

Sorry if i'm spamming the boards here but this leapt out at me and not in a good way:
www.guardian.co.uk/science/2010/sep/03/classicalmusicandopera
" Goldin and Rouse conducted a very elegant study, Orchestrating Impartality: they compared the number of women being hired at auditions with and without screens, and found women were several times more likely to be hired when nobody could see that they were a woman."

I can hardly believe it. I dread to contemplate what they might find if this was applied to other, more standard interviews (i.e. panel interviews for office jobs) where the ability of the individual isn't as easy to see as a bloody audition!

Should I even be surprised? I am but maybe I shouldn't be :(

I read in Sexual Politics that two sets of students were given an identical essay, one had the author's name as Joan * the other as John **. (or somesuch)
The ones who were given the "John" version rated the essay very highly, the other group with the "Joan" version thought it was unremarkable and unimpressive.
This was a few decades ago so I reckon it's changed a bit, but I'm not sure how much. I'm sure that kind of thing is still rife.

ignore the bold!

Not surprised in the least!

And it's bad enough when the consensus is that she may "go off" and have children but these seem to imply that her gender also makes her less capable than her male counterparts.

The first part of it, I would be interested to see the results of the same study with men - I suspect they would be similar ie the men in casual or clubbing attire would not be judged as good. To then compare between men and women in the same attire may have made a point about gender.

The second part - with the screens - fascinating - but happened in the 1970s.

I do think that sexim is still rife in certain industries, but I don't think this article proves much TBH in terms of gender discrimination.

Oh I didn't see that it was done in the 1970'2. Hopefully that would make a big difference. I totally agree about the clothes thing though, seems obvious that the more professionally dressed you are, the more competent you will appear.

I would think that you would get similar results in a some industries if you did them now.

Thing is since the 70s things have become more equal on the surface, but if you scratch you still find a lot of the old attitudes lurking. It depends on the industry but in quite a lot of places it's still there and going strong.

Ben Barres is a female-to-male transgender (transsexual? I'm not great with the terminology) scientist. Anyway, he worked as a woman, had a sex change, then worked as a man. There's a famous comment that someone made at a conference where he was presenting, saying that his work was much better than his sister's.

I just followed trillian's link and there is an interview with ben barres here in which he talks a little about being a woman is science vs being a man, and sexism in general. Very readable and I was nodding my head.