Unlock the editor’s summary for free
Roula Khalaf, editor of the FT, selects her favorite stories in this weekly newsletter.
Imagine an experiment in which the opinions (otherwise identical) of male or older economists are presented to the public. What would you expect to be more persuasive? I think my first assumption would be “none”, in line with the famous pronouncement of former British politician Michael Gove during the Brexit campaign that people “have had enough experts.” Otherwise, my next assumption would be “men”, based on research that suggests that there are still a “Authority Gap” In the way people perceive men and women. But when economists Hans Henrik Sievertsen and Sarah Smith conducted this experiment In real life, The results showed me to be wrong in both aspects.
Sievertsen and Smith showed some 3,000 members of the public in the United States a series of statements on economic issues, from financial regulation to unexpected profit taxes and AI. They were informed if an economist called real life agreed, he agreed, he was uncertain, disagree or disagree with that statement. Then they asked the person for his own opinion. The opinions of experts were extracted from a panel Directed by the University of Chicagowhich regularly causes the opinions of the main academic economists in the best American universities on various issues.
The study found that public opinion on these issues was influenced by the opinions of economists. Even more interesting, female economists were more influential than male. The additional effect of seeing an opinion expressed by a female expert was 20 percent greater than the effect of seeing the same opinion expressed by a male expert.
Why could that be? In search of answers, the researchers have the experiment, but this time they eliminated information about the expert’s credentials (the title of their teacher and the name of their university). When the only thing the public knew was that they were “economists”, the gender gap disappeared: men and women were equally persuasive with the public.
For Sievertsen and Smith, the best explanation for their findings is that public members are assuming their account: that it has become professors in prestigious universities in a field dominated by men, women must be more impressive than men. “In a nutshell, visibly successful women, if they have” achieved “in stereotypically male domains, can be perceived as better than their male counterparts,” they wrote in their article.
Some other studies have found a similar phenomenon. In one experimentacademics directed some Game -based tests In Ethiopia to study whether people followed the advice differently when they were randomly assigned a male or female leader (which was otherwise identical). That experiment found that people were less likely to follow the guidance of a female leader. But when the researchers told a subset of people that their leader was of high skill, people were more likely to follow the guide of the “high capacity” of women than the man of “high capacity.”
They are right in which people assume that a woman who has been successful in a field dominated by men should be better What your male counterparts? Or is this very unfair to men? “I would not say that we know that women have to be better” to reach the top of the economy, Smith told me. “But we certainly know that there is stereotyped discrimination against women below in the process.”
In a study, for example, automatic learning techniques were used to study audio recordings of more than 1,700 economic seminars. He analysis They discovered that the female speakers were interrupted more frequently and before male speakers and that additional interruptions arose largely from members of the women’s audience, instead of men. The study also found that men were more likely to comment instead of asking questions to the presenters.
Other study They discovered that men had a mandate at approximately at the same rate, regardless of whether they were co -authors of research work or wrote them alone, while women were less likely to receive tenure, the more co -author the documents.
Whether members of the public are right to assume that the bar is higher for women in certain professions dominated by men, it is useful to know that it is the assumption they may be doing.
If, for example, you are an older woman in a field dominated by men and you are about to do something that guides the public, suggests that you should silence the inner voice that whispers that the audience could rule out or discard your experience. In fact, they could well be thinking: “It must be very impressive to have reached where it is. I will hear what it has to say.”