Competency and the Female Physique
Many women are familiar with gender bias in the workplace — being asked to bring them coffee, or not receiving a job because it isn’t suitable for their “temperament”. Recent research in social psychology has revealed that this gender bias affects how competent a person is viewed. Predictably, women, or those with more feminine faces, are seen as less competent when compared to men, or masculine faces.
This study, published in the journal Psychological Science, had four parts. Using an online computational model, faces varying in competence were generated. Participants were then asked to rate how competent, and how attractive the faces were. Aligning with previous research, the attractive faces were also rated as more confident. The second experiment asked participants to classify these faces as masculine or feminine. The results showed that more competent faces were viewed as more masculine, and less competent faces were classified as feminine.
More experiments along this line all indicated the same thing — masculinity was associated with a high level of competency, while femininity correlated with a lower level of competency. This particular experiment took participants of all genders, which brings a whole new meaning to the experiment. Females too overwhelmingly believe that males are more competent. These beliefs may not be conscious, but society and the way we have been brought up have ingrained it into us unconsciously.
It demonstrates how deep-rooted sexism is in America. For all purposes, men and women are equal, but psychology experiments such as these are indicators as to just how ingrained casual sexism is in both genders. For us to combat sexism, we must first combat our own beliefs; it will be nearly impossible to fully get rid of sexist beliefs if we do not first get rid of them in ourselves, starting with the belief that males are more competent.
