UWr researchers on the Matilda effect
Negative stereotypes about women in science are making themselves known in non-obvious ways. Presenting women as having achieved something important in a particular field of science sometimes makes audiences find the field less attractive, a study conducted in Poland has shown. The team described the so-called reverse Matilda effect.
Our scientists Marta Kowal and Wojciech Małecki will talk about the “Matilda Effect” on Polish Radio on Program Three on Tuesday around 11:00 .
“The Matilda Effect is the ignoring or diminishing of women’s contributions to science, stemming from the assumption that only men can make meaningful contributions there. However, the same mistaken assumption also leads to less obvious consequences. Well, some people may conclude from it that if women achieve success in a certain field of science, it means that it is not difficult or interesting. So we called this effect the inverse Matilda effect,” – summarizes the study by dr hab. Wojciech Małecki, prof. UWr, head of the team and one of the authors of the publication in Science Education.
Psychologist dr Marta Kowal of the University of Wrocław, who also took part in the study, meanwhile comments: “The results of our study are fascinating and at the same time disturbing. On the one hand, we see how strong the stereotypes about the role of women in science are, and on the other hand, how some attempts to counteract these stereotypes can be counterproductive.”
In Poland, but also worldwide, we have an underrepresentation of women (they are disproportionately underrepresented) in science, technology, mathematics (STEM). Women are also fewer in terms of authorship of prestigious scientific publications.
“An explanation may be the bias against women in the STEM sciences, such as the stereotype that women are less suited to science than men. It is recognized that prejudices should be countered, as they can cause women’s achievements to be judged less favorably than those of men in an unjustified substantive way. Aware of such stereotypes, some women, in turn, may be less confident about their skills or that they will be appreciated, making it harder for them to make a career in an environment where the majority are men,” – comments Wojciech Małecki. The researcher is concerned with the impact of various narratives – literary or journalistic – on audience attitudes.
MATILDA EFFECT
Prejudice against female scientists is described by the Matilda Effect, among others. It assumes that women’s role in science is often unfairly diminished or overlooked, and their achievements sometimes attributed to men.
Modern research indicates that reviewers consistently rate the same scientific paper better if it is signed by a man rather than a woman. Works scientific works by women are also statistically less frequently cited, and women are less frequently recognized with scientific awards (https://doi.org/10.1177/0306312711435830). The question, however, is how to combat prejudice most effectively. The team decided to check it out.
Scientists showed more than 800 high school students one of several versions of a presentation on STEM sciences, biology and mathematics, which talked about interesting discoveries in these fields. The presentations differed only in the gender of the scientists to whom each discovery was attributed. In one version, discoveries in the field were attributed to men (e.g., Prof. Patrick Coleman, who was invented for the study), in another version they were attributed to women (e.g., also non-existent Patricia Coleman), and in a third, control version, authorship was not specified. Presentations that featured women caused male and female students to rate the field as less interesting and express less desire to study it.
It seemed that the version with female scientists would be more motivating for girls, and would not negatively affect the evaluation of boys. “We assumed – according to one psychological theory – that if there was a correspondence in the presentation between the gender of the scholars presented and the gender of the subjects, this should increase the motivation of the female participants in the study to study the field. And this was not the case at all,” – says prof. Wojciech Małecki.
Girls, seeing that women had achieved success in a particular field, did not feel at all encouraged to take an interest in it. The opposite was true: versions of the presentation with female scientists made students (regardless of gender) find the field of knowledge shown in the presentation less interesting.
FALSE ASSUMPTIONS
The researcher explains what cognitive mechanisms may have been behind this result. Since deep-rooted stereotypes suggest that women are less suited to science than men, or not suited at all, and that important achievements in a particular field are made by women, a person honoring such stereotypes may conclude that the entire field is not valuable or worthy of interest – interprets Wojciech Małecki.
Dr Marta Kowal, on the other hand, explains: “we can characterize stereotypes in two dimensions – warmth and competence. Men are identified with a high dimension of competence, while women are identified with a high dimension of warmth. So if a woman achieves success in an area, it can cause cognitive dissonance.” Cognitive dissonance is the unpleasant feeling of discomfort we experience when a contradiction creeps into our beliefs and values. And this discomfort may have arisen when respondents living with the prejudice that “men are competent, not women” listened to a successful (i.e. highly competent) female scientist. “To offset this unpleasant state of dissonance, the simplest solution is to recognize that the field is not important or noteworthy at all” – the researcher adds.
Asked whether the inverse Matilda effect can be observed in other spheres of life, Wojciech Malecki comments that this result is consistent with, for example, the relationship between wage levels and the feminization of professions. “As the research indicates, with the feminization of professions – wages in them fall. Perhaps this process is also influenced by stereotypes of what women are ‘fit’ for” – says Wojciech Małecki. She also mentions the book market: she cites studies showing that the average price of books written by women is 45 percent less than the average price of books written by men, although this is not due to objective factors, such as differences in the genres preferred by female writers.
According to the researcher, the way to weaken the Matilda effect is to prevent the spread of stereotypes. “Such prejudices are acquired at the stage of socialization. We learn about what social gender roles are from an early age” – explains the researcher. Therefore, it is worthwhile that in books, films or in the media, children meet characters of talented scientists as often as female scientists. Therefore, care should be taken to ensure that figures dealing with science from different demographic groups and different fields of science are presented in various communications. The stereotypical figure of the scientist as a white disheveled old man in a white apron – associated with Einstein – needs to be parted with.
WOMEN FAR AND NEAR
The researcher points out that the conclusions of this research (discouragement of a field due to the presentation of women’s success in that field) cannot be extended to other ways of popularizing research work – such as direct contact of female students or researchers with children or young people.
Wojciech Malecki stresses that the research he and his team conducted has its limitations. “In the presentations we talked about prominent middle-aged scientists coming from other countries” – he explains. And this may have increased listeners’ distance from these characters. So it’s possible that instead of identifying with other successful women, the girls focused on the differences – the fact that some distant prominent female scientist from the US or the UK was being talked about. Perhaps, then, if the message had been phrased a little differently – and talked about young Polish scientists – it would have been possible to build greater favorability among the audience and viewers of the presented research.
“More research is needed to bring us closer to the effective mechanisms of these stereotypes to better understand how to balance them and open the door for women to pursue careers in the sciences. We still have a long way to go, but I believe it is worth pursuing” – Marta Kowal added.
In addition to Marta Kowal and Wojciech Małecki, the team included prof. Chip Bruce (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign), dr Anna Krasnodębska (WSB Merito Opole University) and dr hab. Piotr Sorokowski, prof. UWr. (PAP)
Sources: PAP SCIENCE IN POLAND
