It’s generally accepted that women are more emotional than men, but apparently there is very little evidence for this. Here’s a recent experiment:
To see why people continue to believe that women are the more emotional sex, the scientists devised their straightforward experiment. They showed 48 men and women (college students) pictures of faces depicting anger, sadness, fear or disgust for three seconds. Beneath each picture was a sentence describing a plausible reason for that emotion—the rattlesnake or road-rage examples I gave above. The participants then saw the faces without the sentences and pressed either of two keys to indicate whether the person in the picture was “emotional” or “having a bad day.”
Both men and women attributed women’s emotional expressions more to their emotional nature and men’s to the situation—despite being given situational information to explain every face.
I’m wondering how often often I assume that women are more “emotional” at work. Perhaps more than I’d like to think. This is a pretty engrained stereotype.
July 9th, 2009 at 4:29 pm
It’s one of many double standards. The one I was thinking about today that often if a man says that he loves children, he’ll be suspected as a pedophile but if a woman says she dislikes children, she’ll be thought of as cruel and cold.
July 11th, 2009 at 7:05 am
Yes, and the men-children idea is a really damaging one.
July 11th, 2009 at 5:35 pm
My pregnancy is becoming visible and I recently got a belly pat from a male student who is employed by my department. It surprised me, but didn’t really bother me. I considered pointing out that some women really don’t like belly pats, but decided not to discourage a young man’s positive interest in babies and children. (He is also good about conversing with my 2 yr old when she visits the office.)
July 11th, 2009 at 7:51 pm
I hope you patted him back….