Oldal 75 [75]
WOMEN IN THE SCIENTIFIC ELITE
Interrelation of gender identity and sexist beliefs in their careers
——o—
THE SOCIAL ISSUE, OBJECTIVE OF RESEARCH
The cause of the significantly lower proportional presence of women in acad¬
emies and leadership positions, historically and into the present day, can
mostly be interpreted within the scope of the gender order?! dominating the
society, legitimised by the different gender stereotypes. As a result of this,
women are currently still disadvantaged with regards to the redistribution of
positions.
Thus, answers are needed not only to the questions as to what barriers female
scholars need to overcome during their career, whether they are able to break
through the glass ceiling, what kind of compromises they need to reach (fam¬
ily versus career), or even what the difficulties are of entering the male-dom¬
inated terrain. We also need to address the questions of how gender stereotypes
appear in the self-identification of women explicitly and implicitly, and how
the essentializing discourse appears in their own lives as well. Earlier papers
have established the fact that it is not only men who are the ones supporting
“sexist myths”, but that women often do so as well (ways of self-discrimina¬
tion,””’ self-stereotyping and internalisation). This can be viewed as an indirect
barrier in situations where women attempt to succeed in areas that can be
characterized as male-overrepresented.?'? This means that hostile sexism, as
216 Nagy: Ki áll a sikeres nö mögött?, 461.
27 A more detailed explanation can be found in Anker et al.: "The glass ceiling metaphor is not
only an indication of the presence of an external, objective obstacle, but it also indicates that
women themselves are refusing to choose certain professions and jobs, although they would
be able to — they can therefore be considered victims of ‘self-discrimination” (Anker et al.
quoted by Nagy—Primecz: Nok és férfiak a szervezetekben, 8).
This and similar phenomena are framed as the so-called “Goldberg paradigm” in the literature.
Philip Goldberg’s experiment is from 1968. As mentioned before, he asked two groups of
students to evaluate the same essays. The only difference was that the essays were first alleged
to be authored by men, then by women. The results show the deeply rooted prejudices men¬
tioned above have affected the objectivity of the students’ evaluation of the papers. The texts
attributed to a woman author received worse results than the same texts when did when at¬
tributed to a male author (except for those handling traditionally female topics). Certain
analysts found it important to state that the research results show that it is not only men who
have gender prejudices. In fact, both men and women rate men more favourably than women,
even in the case of their performance being identical. (Lincoln et al.: The Matilda, 308)
218
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