I'm not a psychologist, I have nothing but that BA in the field, but if I had to make a guess, my guess is that "wonderful" is not the same as "competent".
Even at the time, there were studies that showed traits associated with women were rated more positively by men and women than traits associated with men.
The way you study this is you'd give a list of words:
And then you'd have a group of subjects rate them as more associated with men or women on a scale.
Ideally you'd get a big sample and replicate this study.
Then either in the same study at a different time, or another study, you'd take those same words and you'd ask your subjects to rate them as positive or negative.
That's where you see effects like the one mentioned in the wikipedia article.
That kind of thing's been done a bunch of times.
But studies on gender and competency have been done too, and at the time they showed the same pattern as we found.
I say "At the time" because this is >20 years ago.
>my guess is that "wonderful" is not the same as "competent".
Right. There are two different sets of benefits that help or hurt someone in different ways. Being competent when standing trial can work against you while being wonderful will reduce the risk of a conviction and reduce the sentence if you are convicted.
We have identified the "competent" bias and are taking steps to correct it, but we need to do the same with the "wonderful" bias in other systems. For starters we need to recognize how strong that bias is in certain fields. For one example, there are specific crimes that people would bet are extremely gendered in nature, and the crime statistics show they would be right, but interviewing the population at large and querying victims, including those who never went to the police or who were turned away by the police (or even worse, who couldn't legally be victims because of how biased even the laws are), we see the gender component goes away. The rate of men victimized by women and women victimized by men are at near a 50/50 ration (I think 49.8 to 50.2).
Even the extent of studies measuring the impact of the wonderful effect is lacking compared to studies measuring the competent effect (which itself is likely a bias of the wonderful effect).
> There are two distinct numbers regarding the pay gap: non-adjusted versus adjusted pay gap. The latter typically takes into account differences in hours worked, occupations chosen, education and job experience.[1] In the United States, for example, the non-adjusted average woman's annual salary is 79% of the average man's salary, compared to 95% for the adjusted average salary.[2][3][4][5]
The remaining 5% could be from the "women are wonderful" positive attributes not being the narrow selection of ones that are highly sought after in well-renumerated jobs, or (spitballing here) psychosocial (Expectations of a pay gap driving negotiation behavior or something).
Not needed because "women are wonderful" is to some degree mostly orthogonal to "men are more professional/deserve more/"... wonderful good attributes are not needed or even to some degree counter to "high performance" (but depends a lot where we look at, sure!)
Also pay-gap has likely also to do with the current men-bias also? Wonder if that would be the same if we had 90% woman throughout in these decising positions..
In the end all mine assumptions, what I actually want to say is: I don't think those two contradict or relate at all.. what GP already said well with "biases swing in all sorts of directions depending on the context"
I imagine these biases swing in all sorts of directions depending on the context. Some are intuitive, many are not.