THREE DIFFERENCES BETWEEN THE SEXES 3

March 2009
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At present, women are disadvantaged in opportunities for jobs. They obtain less interesting jobs, get less pay, and achieve lower levels of promotion. This is not due to lack of ability or of desire, but to the patriarchal structure of society. In a male-dominated society, women have to expend more effort, more time, and more skill to achieve a position a less qualified man achieves more easily. This biases the competition strongly in favour of a man: it ceases to be true competition. The lack of success of women in high-status jobs may also be affected by the way girls are reared. Females take orders from authority more easily and comply with them more readily, they are less likely to protest and are slower to become angry, so they are easier to exploit by men and more ready to take less interesting, lower-status jobs.

The subordinate position of women to men, which is initiated by the way the two sexes are reared, tends to be self-perpetuating. Women, brought up in this way, believe that they are inferior to men in both intelligence and ability. Even when the work of men and women is of identical quality, women tend to denigrate that of their own sex and to rate a man’s work more highly. In an experiment conducted in America, a group of women university students were given six scientific papers to rate. The name of the author of each paper was manipulated by the investigator so that half of the women thought the author was a man and the other half thought the author was a woman. The women were asked to judge the quality of each paper for style, for professional competence, for conviction, and for over-all impact on the reader. Invariably, whatever the subject of the paper, if the name of the author was male, it was rated higher than if the women thought it had been written by a woman.

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