Women Speak Drastically Less When They’re Surrounded by Dudes. And That’s Bad.

[redqueen]

http://jezebel.com/5944642/women-speak-75-less-when-theyre-surrounded-by-dudes-and-thats-bad?post=52818886

Womanhood is full of frustrating hunches, and society is full of people who want to pooh-pooh those hunches. "I'm pretty sure I'm being treated like shit right now because of my vagina," we women say. "Shut UP, women! Because menget injured in industrial accidents! Therefore, equality reigns!" the pooh-poohers reply. There's almost nothing as satisfying as having one's hunches backed up by science. So color me delighted by this new study published in American Political Science Review, which found that, in collaborative group settings,"the time that women spoke was significantly less than their proportional representation—amounting to less than 75 percent of the time that men spoke."

HA. That is just about the truest shit that I have ever heard. I (and, I suspect, pretty much any woman) can access that feeling really quickly and vividly—when you find yourself in conversation with a circle of men and, against your better judgment and all your feminist impulses, you just turtle up. You retire. You forfeit, because their lungs are bigger, they're groomed for assertiveness since birth, and you're groomed to assume that nobody will take you seriously anyway. You wait for a pause in a room of interruptors. Sigh. I do it like crazy, and I am a fucking loudmouth feminist yelling machine.

So it's satisfying to have one's hunches backed up by a study like this: It's not just me failing at feminism, and it's not just men being paternalistic dicks, it's some sort of sinister societal force that shepherds us into those roles. This isn't just teh evil menz (blah blah blah) doing this to us—we are active participants. We are turtlers. Nothing is solved here—no one is to blame and everyone is to blame—but it's comforting, at least, to confirm that it is happening.

And it's not good. According to the study's authors, women contributed to the conversation much more when it was framed as consensus-building rather than a majority-rules vote. And when women's voices were included, the group's conclusions were profoundly different:

...

Interesting findings from this joint study out of BYU and Princeton. We really desperately need more women in politics. In some Scandinavian countries they use quotas to force the situation, in politics and board rooms too. Given the glacial pace of change here, and the recent regression, I'm starting to wonder if it might be helpful here, not that it would ever sell.

And yeah, yeah, yeah, 'but Michelle Bachmann!' I know. However I think we would have a better chance of not having 37 states where the prosecution of women for falling down stairs while pregnant was a real threat if we had equal representation in legislatures.