Just Like a Woman?

Paper Summary:

This paper looks at how women, even in everyday conversational life, internalize stereotypes about female achievement and how rather than speak from positions of power, women often use their position as a speaker to deflate their own sense of credibility, rather than to enhance it. It demonstrates how the problem of inequities between the sexes is a social and cultural, as well as a political concern. It attempts to understand why this happens by evaluating such scenarios as the decline of achievement and self-esteem in adolescent girls in the fields of math and science.

From the Paper:

"Why do women engage in such self-abasing behavior, even in humorous dialogue? Why are women so apt to internalize poor societal notions of female competency? Although the answer to this question is complex, what is clear is that this phenomenon begins quite early on in women's lives. In 1990, a study conducted by the American Association of University Women entitled Shortchanging Girls, Shortchanging America became famous because of a book by journalist Peggy Orenstein, called Schoolgirls. (xxiii) Schoolgirls shows how young women, whose academic performance often exceeds their male counterparts well into high school, become affected by societal perceptions of female incompetence. In her book, Orenstein records this telling conversation between two high school students named Suzy and Lindsay."

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