{"id":2419,"date":"2019-02-22T08:00:05","date_gmt":"2019-02-22T14:00:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/trot\/?p=2419"},"modified":"2019-02-15T13:03:22","modified_gmt":"2019-02-15T19:03:22","slug":"gender-confidence-and-who-gets-to-be-an-expert","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/trot\/2019\/02\/22\/gender-confidence-and-who-gets-to-be-an-expert\/","title":{"rendered":"Gender, Confidence, and Who Gets to Be an Expert"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Photo of a radio interview by US Embassy Canada, Flickr CC<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

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> to <\/span>#citeblackwomen<\/span><\/a>. <\/span><\/p>\n

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. In 2008, for example, only 13% of contributors to Wikipedia were women. 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 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 as experts within their own work.<\/h5>\n