{"id":72704,"date":"2019-03-15T09:14:03","date_gmt":"2019-03-15T14:14:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/?p=72704"},"modified":"2019-03-15T09:14:03","modified_gmt":"2019-03-15T14:14:03","slug":"gender-confidence-and-who-gets-to-be-an-expert","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/2019\/03\/15\/gender-confidence-and-who-gets-to-be-an-expert\/","title":{"rendered":"Gender, Confidence, and Who Gets to Be an Expert"},"content":{"rendered":"

On January 31,\u00a0<\/span>The New York Times<\/span><\/i> responded<\/span><\/a> to a letter from Kimberly Probolus, an American Studies PhD candidate, with a commitment to publish gender parity in their letters to the editor (on a weekly basis) in 2019. This policy comes in the wake of many efforts to change the overwhelming overrepresentation of men in the position of \u201cexpert\u201d in the media, from the <\/span>Op-Ed project<\/span><\/a> to <\/span>womenalsoknowstuff.com<\/span><\/a>\u00a0(now with a sociology spinoff<\/a>!) to <\/span>#citeblackwomen<\/span><\/a>.<\/span><\/p>\n

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The classic sociology article \u201c<\/span>Doing Gender<\/span><\/a>,\u201d explains that we repeatedly accomplish gender through consistent, patterned interactions. According to the popular press and imagination — such as Rebecca Solnit\u2019s essay, <\/span>Men Explain Things to Me<\/span><\/a>\u00a0—\u00a0one of these patterns includes men stepping into the role of expert. Within the social sciences, there is research on how gender as a performance can explain gender disparities in knowledge-producing spaces. <\/span><\/p>\n

Women are less likely to volunteer expertise in a variety of spaces, and researchers often explain this finding as a result of self-esteem or confidence. Julia Bear and Benjamin Collier find that, in 2008 for example, only 13% of contributors to Wikipedia were women<\/a>. Two reasons cited for this gender disparity were a lack of confidence in their expertise and a discomfort with editing (which involves conflict). Likewise, studies of classroom participation have consistently found<\/a> that men are more likely than women to talk in class — an unsurprising finding considering that classroom participation studies show that students with higher confidence are more likely to participate. Within academia, research shows that men are much more likely to cite themselves<\/a> as experts within their own work.<\/p>\n

This behavior may continue because both men and women are sanctioned for behavior that falls outside of gender performances. In\u00a0research on salary negotiation<\/a>, researchers found that women can face a backlash when they ask for raises because self-promotion goes against female gender norms. Men, on the other hand, may be sanctioned for being too self-effacing<\/a>.<\/p>\n

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Source: Fortune Live Media, Flickr CC<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Knowledge exchange on the Internet may make the sanctions for women in expert roles more plentiful. As demonstrated by the experiences of female journalists<\/a>, <\/span>video game enthusiasts<\/a>, and women in general online<\/a>, being active on the Internet carries intense risk of exposure<\/a> to trolling, harassment, abuse, and misogyny. The social science research on online misogyny<\/a> is also recent and plentiful.<\/p>\n

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Photo Credit: Sharon Mollerus, Flickr CC<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Social media can also be a place to amplify the expertise of women or to respond to particularly <\/span>egregious<\/span><\/a> examples of mansplaining. And institutions like higher education and the media can continue to intervene to disrupt the social expectation that an expert is always a man. Check out the \u201c<\/span>Overlooked<\/span><\/a>\u201d obituary project for previously underappreciated scientists and thinkers, including the great sociologist <\/span>Ida B. Wells<\/span><\/a>.<\/span><\/p>\n

For more on gendered confidence in specific areas, such as STEM, see more research on <\/span>Gendering Intelligence<\/span><\/a>.<\/p>\n