6 Gender Based Stereotypes Debunked with Science

Gender discrimination has held women back for ages. Even in the post-feminism world, stereotypes which have evolved with culture are still alive.

South Asia is rigid in general when it comes to norms and traditions but gender stereotypes are also deeply rooted here. The problem has grown to an extent that often modern societies with law and legislature fail to prove gender equity.

“Stereotyping is a process of ascribing to an individual general attributes, characteristics, or roles by reason only of his or her apparent membership in a particular group.”

In South Asia, gender stereotypes are actively enforced, any deviation from these stereotypes is severely punished. There are some stereotypes which are associated with women and are hard to be broken. I am listing down six of those here.

1. Women fail in leadership and diplomacy

Leadership and diplomacy are both learned behaviors. Unlike innate abilities like creativity or keen observation, attributes like leadership and diplomacy can be developed.

In fact, studies reveal that the countries with more women in government, politics, diplomacy and other similar fields are far better than the countries where men are majorly in power. This obviously includes Nordic countries, but even nations like Rwanda have made incredible progress since the civil war of 1994. They also have the highest percentage of women in parliament.

Workplaces where male leaders outnumber female counterparts, the environment is created on the male’s terms. Men create gender roles and women are expected to follow those.

For example, Pakistan has never made a woman Foreign Minister, Finance Minister, Defense Minister – all key leadership roles which are considered only fit for men. Meanwhile, we have had only one female Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto, who was elected on a man’s legacy.

Ann Towns, a Wallenberg Academy Fellow at the University of Gothenburg, proved through research that women are actively sidelined from decision making in such cases.

Meaning women are just there symbolically without being key players. They are deliberately alienated in some cases male counterparts straight up refuse to negotiate and cooperate with women.

This actually happened to Condoleezza Rice the former United States Secretary of State.

In this hostility when women succeed that’s true leadership and diplomacy. While efforts are made to sabotage their efforts, they’re also made the scapegoat for failures.

2. Women are bad drivers

We actually adopted this one from the conservative Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. This stereotype has been justified based on the cultural belief that women are more emotionally volatile than men and are slow learners.

The statistics actually prove that more men get into car accidents than women. That’s when we compare the ratio of men and women that can drive and the probability of them getting into an accident.

The funny thing is if women are emotionally volatile then how are they passive and docile?

Statistics for men versus women drivers were not available for South Asia. This has never been the subject of any prominent research.

According to the American health body, Center for Diseases Control and Prevention (CDC) Web-based Injury Statistics Query and Reporting System (WISQARS) database women are better drivers than men. In light of all the data from 2016, we can safely say women, in general, are safer drivers than men.

To be more specific using traffic fatality statistics, America’s worst drivers are likelier to be men or people who live in the South, are either young or old.

While the probability for the best drivers in America is women from the country’s Northeast region, are aged 35 to 75, or identify as Asian.

3. Women have a bad work ethic due to family issues

South Asia has a huge problem with attributional error in this case. Whenever men ask for cooperation at the workplace for any family related issue it is painted as a situational factor.

The male employee is evaluated on his overall performance, not that one instance of asking for relaxation. In fact, men are rewarded for being responsible for such behavior.

While in the same situation the women will be blamed for using a woman’s card and not being responsible at work.

‘That is why we don’t hire women,’ they will be told.

In psychology, this is called attributional error or attributional bias. While as humans have a tendency for this behavior we particularly do so when it comes to negative things.

We can only counter it through self-awareness.

Several studies have proved that women actually work harder than men.

The Hive is a platform that studies gender differences in the workplace. According to one of their studies “State of the Workplace Report”, women are assigned 10 percent more work, yet most of it is non-promotable tasks.

Meanwhile, Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley researcher Laura Kray found that ‘men tend to have more lenient ethical standards than women’. Moreover, there exists a bias when men negotiate with women in business.  Negotiators are more likely to tell a blatant lie to a female counterpart than to the men.

4. Women lack a libido

The science behind this is actually the shame that restricts women from expressing their sexual desires and needs. Women are taught to associate the act of intercourse with shame and are forced to suppress their sexuality.

If a woman tries to deviate from that behavior she is shunned and considered bad.

This can be led as far as to women being denied justice when it comes to sexual violence.

Unfortunately, the paradox that is women are seen as sexual objects but then their own libido is considered insensitive.

These are all attitudes that are learned through integration. Katz’s fundamentalist theory and theory of learning apply to this phenomenon. Then there’s the Marx theory of sexual politics that boils everything down to controlling women.

According to a 2017 study by Lylla Winzer,  Barbara Krahé, and Philip Guest, while we do have an abundance of research and data on child sexual abuse, South Asia is not to concerned with verifying statistics for such abuse against adult women.

5. Women are talkative and love to gossip

This may be a cultural thing. In some cultures, people are just more chatty. Similarly, in some cultures, women gossip more than men while in some, men love to talk. The science behind it has more to do with socialization. Gossip is a competitive tool to control information.

According to a study ‘Gender Difference in Gossip and Friendship’ conducted by undergraduate University students at Western Canadian University, the relationship between gossip and friendship was predicted to be stronger in the males as compared to the females.

Men do gossip with friends as a social hobby. They also do so to control the narrative. In men, the information gossip scale was strongly associated with male friendship quality.

Women gossip too but that is more about physical appearances. They do not use it as an information control tactic. This type of gossip may be more of a competitive threat to the relationship among women, rather than a bonding experience like it is with men.

The tools employed were the Friendship questionnaire and the Tendency to Gossip questionnaire.

The study by Hive “State of the Workplace Report”, reported that women converse via in-person interactions.

Meanwhile, men use platform threads like Slack, Trello and engage in more conversations with their fellows giving birth to digital and discrete gossip.

6. Women are bad at Science

This myth has been used for decades to discourage women in the field of science and technology. The irony of the matter is that science itself does not verify this bias.

According to the UNESCO Bangkok 2015 report titled ‘A Complex Formula: Girls and Women in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics in Asia’ women in STEM are actually impassioned and inspired but learning material worsens gender stereotypes.

Grade 9 science textbook in Cambodia shows how male and female silhouettes are attributed to different functions of the central nervous system such as thinking, listening, seeing, etc. When women are systematically deterred from perusing sciences no wonder females only constituent 30 percent of STEM.

The higher you go up the STEM ladder, the fewer women role models you will find. This further strengthens the stereotype that women cannot fit into science.

but the person who made an algorithm which helped us to see the first picture of a black hole was a woman. Who said women cannot excel in science?

Some people will still affirm these stereotypes despite all the scientific studies that have disproved them. Now most rational people acknowledge the science.

In modern society cutting back on someone’s socio-economic opportunities is the worst blow.

People will argue that women like Marie Curie asserted their value even in the pre-feminist era. Then why do women fight for more rights in a post-feminist era?

Despite the sexism and these stereotypes, women are making their way up. The fear of women surpassing men should not be used to hold them back. They must be given equal opportunities to showcase their talent and abilities. In the end, their contributions and successes will not only help them but also shape the future of the next generations.