Using acceptance speeches to further causes is not new. So, it wasn’t particularly surprising that actress Patricia Arquette used her time at the microphone at the Academy Awards last Sunday to implore us all to pay attention to equal rights for all women.
Society’s opportunities for improvement, when it comes to the issue of equal rights in the workplace, are well documented. Stacks of studies outline issues including the glass ceiling, pay equality, and maternal wall bias, or discrimination that occurs against caregivers, and particularly working mothers.
For instance, according to a recent Harvard Business Review study, if a woman has a child, her chances of being hired drop by 79%. If hired, her salary offer is reduced by $11,000 and, once on the job she is half as likely to be promoted as is a childless woman.
While troubling, this is neither new nor surprising.
What is new this week is a study by Tel Aviv University that suggests that unconscious biases of elementary school instructors dramatically affect student academic choices and trajectories later on.
In the research, published by the National Bureau of Economic Research, students from sixth grade through the end of high school were given two exams. The first was graded by objective scorers who did not know their names. The second was given by instructors who knew them.
The girls outscored the boys in the test that was scored anonymously, but when graded by the instructors who were familiar with their names, the boys outscored the girls. The research concluded that, in math and science, teachers overestimate boys’ skills and underestimate girls’.
And, when the boys scored higher in math and science, they were encouraged to pursue these fields of study. The girls, conversely, were not encouraged.
Similarly, in a study published this week on gender bias and entrepreneurs, UC – Santa Barbara sociologist Sarah Thébaud found