differenceblog, posts by tag: confidence - LiveJournal

Laura Beckwith thinks girls aren't using tools. An Associated Press story dated September 24th tells about the many experiments Beckwith, with her advisor Margaret Burnett, have designed to try to figure out why women do not seem to use advanced functions in the software they use. Beckwith suspects that this is down to a difference in the way men and women solve problems.

Beckwith et al (2006) found that confidence did not predict how much men used a debugging tool in an experiment asking subjects to correct broken spreadsheets. Confidence did predict how much women used the tool. When women did not use the debugging tool, the AP article says that they ended up with "more bugs than when they started." After many manipulations of the software, Beckwith was able to create a version of the debugging tool that women used just as often or more often than men did.

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I do correct a lot of spreadsheets. I fact, I think it's safe to say that I <3 spreadsheets. Spreadsheets are love. However, I've never seen a debugging tool for one, and I'm generally distrustful of the "suggestions" that any software makes to me, whether it be for spelling errors, formatting, or anything else where that damned paperclip pops up and makes me want to strangle it. Yes, I know, I could use OpenOffice -- or even just turn off the Paperclip. That's not as much fun as having a focus for my frustration.

Beckwith's main suggestion is that there are differences in the way men and women solve problems, and that current computer tools are not set up to make that intuitive for women. However, what I find really interesting is her suggestion women over-tinker. The more "tinkering" men do, the more bugs they fix, according to Beckwith. However, women seem to overtinker. This strikes me as related to introducing more errors into the spreadsheets, but I'm not sure how to make the pieces fit.

A new survey conducted by Harris Interactive (2007) that men and women are equally likely to drink wine (63% and 61%), but that women were more likely than men to feel uncomfortable making wine choices. The survey, commissioned by Robert Mondavi Private Selection, found the biggest gaps in wine attitudes by age, not by sex. Most of those surveyed (69%) expressed that they wanted to know more about wine. Women expressed more discomfort about choosing a wine from a wine list, pairing wines with food, or interacting with a waiter when selecting wine. Women were also less likely to have sent back a bottle of wine after tasting it (17% to 10%). Barber et al (2006) also found that women expressed more concern about making a good wine choice than men. Barber suggests that self-confidence is the predicting factor in wine anxiety.

It is important to note that although men and women drink wine with roughly equal frequency, this is the only alcoholic beverage for which this is true; men are more likely to drink beer or spirits than women (e.g. Chomak & Collins, 1987). Although the gap in men's and women's drinking rates seems to be narrowing ("Girl Drinks", 10/3/06), a woman who drinks is far more likely to drink wine than a man who drinks.

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Excuse me for a moment of unsurprise. Women expressed more anxiety over making a choice? Women seemed to have less self-confidence? Wine selection is built up into this weird cultural juggernaut, where confidence is pretty much the name of the game. We've had multiple discussions over the tendency of women to have less confidence than men, and I don't know if any of your have tripped over a solution yet. I certainly haven't. However, I do think I have some insight into the illogic that makes women (or anyone with low self-confidence) uncomfortable dealing with the boggling selection available on most wine lists.

I've never sent back a bottle of wine. I've only sent back anything at a restaurant once, a mixed drink, last month. Mojitos are supposed to be sweet. And now I feel really self-conscious about admitting I ordered a Mojito. As Brian said in Family Guy, "what? it's not a gay drink!" It was bad enough ordering a Mojito in front of all my friends (yeah, I'm not particularly secure in my masculinity. would you be?) . It was even more embarrassing sending it back, because I felt like that set me up as some sort of expert on Mojitos. In fact, I wouldn't have sent it back, except for the conflicting presence of a (male) friend of mine who is a big proponent of sending things back. He wouldn't have let me off the hook if I hadn't.

Many theories to explain gender differences hinge upon the assumption that women have lower self-esteem than men. But what is self-esteem and how is it different, if at all, from other constructs like ego, self-concept, and self-image? Where does it come from? Sadly, while many studies attempt to detect the antecedents of self-esteem, both high and low, the construct seems to be difficult to define. The idea is accepted as self-evident, but seems to encompass many different kinds and degrees of knowledge. Wikipedia defines self-esteem as "a person's overall self-appraisal of their worth." Josephs et al (1992) equates self-esteem with the sense that one is a "good person" -- going on to claim that this belief arises from independence for men and interdependence for women. Jennifer Campbell (1990) suggests that high self-esteem is associated with greater certainty in a person's self-beliefs; she claims that people with low self-esteem tend to be more susceptible to negative social cues. Benabou and Tirole (2002), writing from an economic viewpoint, argue that the differentiation between self-confidence and self-deception is a false one.

Lately, the importance of self-esteem as a predictor of behavior has been called into question. Baumeister et al (2003) argue that high achievment causes high self-esteem, and not the reverse. Swann et al's 2007 review arguing for the validity of self-esteem as a predictor provides a decent review of the history of self-esteem theory, showing how the pendulum has moved between self-esteem being a "panacea" to "inconsequential." Scheff and Fearon (2004) suggest that self-esteem research is fundamentally flawed by a bias towards cognitive evaluation versus emotional states. Pelham et al (2005) posit that differentiating between implicit and explicit self-esteem addresses this issue, as well as arguing for a gender difference on this distinction.

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Nearly 300 words and I still fail to build a definition of self-esteem any better than what I grabbed off Wikipedia. Well, doesn't that just make me feel cruddy. It's tempting to call it an umbrella term, but I can't really separate out any of the pieces without reverting to the original term. Self-esteem is rarely consistently high in all arenas and is probably more of a state than a trait (that is, it varies day-to-day rather than being stable over time). I know that when I first started testosterone treatment, my self-esteem skyrocketed. I felt fantastic, invulnerable, and competent. Was that a strictly hormonal response, or a feeling of accomplishment over beginning the medical phase of my transition? There's no way for me to tell, but I have my suspicions over which factors had more influence than others.

NB: Campbell was a contributor on Baumeister et al, 2003. See also Baumeister's theories on sexuality and gossip.

Abbey and Melby (1986) found that males perceived more sexual intent than females in both ambiguous and nonambiguous nonverbal situations. Levesque et al (2006) also found that men attributed more sexual interest after brief interaction than women, but that women tended to generalize attraction to positive personality characteristics more than men. Levesque et al also found that masculine women tended to sexualize opposite-sex interactions more than feminine women, but there were no differences between "masculine" and "feminine" men (rated using the BSRI).

Levesque et al did not provide the ages or recruitment methods of their participants, nor was I able to find this information about Abbey and Melby's experiments, although later studies by Abbey (e.g. 1987, 1995) use college student samples. Also, no studies seem to have been done to assess the level of sexual intent inferred by gay men and lesbians in same or opposite sex pairings.

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In my experience, men assume no one is hitting on them, and women assume everyone is hitting on them. Obviously, this is an oversimplification. I've known and dated guys who were supremely arrogant and women who were painfully self-conscious. However, I still found that the arrogance in men tended to translate to thinking they would get a positive response to flirtation, and the self-deprecating women assumed that the flirtation was non-serious, or sexual only. It's a self-fulfilling observation in my case. I tend to assume that no one is flirting with me because they see me as male, and wonder if they're seeing me as something else if they make their intentions known.

Noel-Levitz higher education consultants (2007) surveyed nearly 100,000 college freshmen in 2006, and found some interesting gender differences in their responses. Men tended to be more confident about their ability, but women tended to report better study habits. The Noel-Levitz report states that only 73 men graduate college for every 100 women who do. Diprete and Buchmann (2006) suggest that the benefits of a college education have also increased more for women than for men over the past forty years. However, Tanaguchi and Kaufman (2005) unsurprisingly found that being divorced and having young children made completing a degree less likely for "non-traditional college students" (entering college years after high school) of both genders, although they note that these conditions more traditionally affect women.

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The last time I got angry enough to physically attack someone, I was 16, and a college freshman. One of the guys from my dorm saw that he was getting under my skin, and wanted to see how far he could push. He suggested that the only reason women entered college was to get the "Mrs." degree, and (being young, dumb, and unrealistic) I attempted to clock him with a dumbbell. Even fourteen years later, I have a hard time thinking dispassionately about the topic.

In 1981, Hemmer and Kleiber set out to examine the labels of "tomboy" and "sissy" in a midwestern school. They found that the children labeled by their peers as tomboys and sissies weren't actually any more androgynous than other children, but that there were specific behaviors that could trigger the labels, such as creativity in boys. The infamous J. Michael Bailey, however, found that tomboys were "substantially and significantly more masculine than their sisters" (Bailey et all, 2002), although not as masculine as their brothers. However, the "tomboys" in Bailey's study were identified by their parents, not by their peers.

It is unclear whether the boundaries of gender-appropriate behavior are substantially different for adults and children. However, the reactions of children to any non-conformity can be very severe. Zucker et al (1995) found that boys had a stronger negative reaction to a feminine boy than girls did to a masculine girl. Moore (2003) also found that boys received a more negative reaction to gender-atypical expression than girls. Interestingly, Hilgencamp and Livingston (2002) found that women who classified themselves as "tomboys" had greater confidence in their career success, suggesting that their self-esteem had not been damaged by their experience.

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What do men exaggerate and women downplay? Their computer skills.

Eszter Hargittai and Steven Shafer put 51 women and 49 men through internet-use skill test, and found that the women consistently rated their skill lower than comparably skilled men. The skills test gave participants a number of subjects to research, and allowed them to search for the information however they saw fit (with the researcher watching over their shoulder).

Hargittai and Shafer found no statistically significant difference between actual skill levels for men and women. However, "not one woman thought of herself as an `expert' user, and not one man thought of himself as a complete novice." The sex of the researcher administering the survey and observing the web use was not mentioned, and that seems like an oversight. The survey about web use was administered orally to "establish rapport." It would be interesting to see how results differed with less face-to-face interaction with researchers, or with an interviewer of a different sex. As was demonstrated by research done by BMW, directions from a man and from a woman can be met with very different responses. A similar experiment, with male and female researchers and an incentive to perform well would likely yield different results.