Science Lesson: You Can't Tell What Someone Does by How They Look

By Jessica Valenti, Guardian UK

19 July 16

In a new study, women with more traditionally feminine looks were judged less likely to be scientists. We need to ask why

he casino that mandates all female employees style their hair and wear makeup. The high school that won’t allow girls to wear shirts that reveal their shoulders. The judge who berates a lawyer for wearing a pantsuit rather than a skirt. From the time we are girls and throughout our lives, women are told what to wear and how to look in order to project the “right” image. We’re supposed to look “feminine” but not so sexy as to not be taken seriously. We need to look authoritative, but not intimidating.

For women, negotiating what we’re supposed to look like can be downright exhausting, especially when the standard of what’s deemed appropriate can change drastically from place to place. Those who haven’t engaged in this particular balancing act may think it’s much ado about nothing – just look professional and leave it at that! But research bears out what women have long known: how traditionally “feminine” we appear significantly impacts the way people judge us.

Earlier this year, for example, a study out of the University of Colorado at Boulder found that female scientists who looked more feminine were frequently assumed not to be scientists. Researchers asked participants to look at photos of male and female scientists, rate them on a scale from masculine to feminine, and guess whether they were a scientist or a teacher. Women thought to be more feminine-looking were more likely to be identified as teachers. Men’s perceived masculinity or femininity, however, had no impact on whether or not people thought they were scientists.

“We knew there were accounts out there in the literature for decades that women scientists can’t wear skirts if they want to be taken seriously. They are seen as ‘too feminine,’” researcher and lead author Sarah Banchefsky has said. Some women in Stem fields, she says, feel like they can’t even talk about wanting to have children.

It seems that the more supposedly womanly you seem the less seriously you are taken. It’s a real problem in an area like the sciences, where women are already underrepresented. But it’s certainly not limited to the Stem fields.

Women in other areas, like academia, face the same dilemma. As professor Francesca Stavrakopoulou wrote here in the Guardian in 2014, “a woman who adopts a more feminine style is too preoccupied with pretty things to be a serious academic, because a woman can’t be both attractive and intelligent.” (Of course if a woman adopts a look that comes across as too masculine, she’s dismissed or berated for that, as well.)

Part of the problem may be the general disdain we have for all things thought of as girly. The more feminine something is, the less seriously we take it. Even among feminists, there is a line of thinking that eschews trappings thought of as traditionally female – we don’t want our daughters participating in princess culture, or we roll our eyes when they want yet another pink frilly dress. I’m guilty of this myself.

As Julia Serano wrote in her groundbreaking book, Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity, “until feminists work to empower femininity and pry it away from the insipid, inferior meanings that plague it – weakness, helplessness, fragility, passivity, frivolity, and artificiality – those meanings will continue to haunt every person who is female and/or feminine”.

When we send the message – to our kids, friends or co-workers – that the traditionally feminine is somehow less than, we give power to the most foundational sexist ideas about what kinds of gender expression should be taken seriously.