5 Topics In Psychology That We’re Not Allowed To Talk About - Dr Cory Clark

Is pervasive misogyny a myth?

(laughs) Uh, I have claimed that it is. (laughs) Yeah, I think, um ... I, I don't wanna say it was necessarily always a myth. I ... Just before we got in here, I was talking about how I was treated in Cairo. (laughs)

Yeah. Tell that story.

I c- ... Oh, I was just at the airport and I was getting onto an elevator. I was there first. I hit the button, I started to step on, and these two guys walk up and they're like, "No! No!" And they waved to me to get off. And then I got off and they got on and they went up (laughs) and I had to take the next one. Um, so that kind of thing exists in places in the world still in 2023. Um, but in the US, uh, you're not getting much of that anymore and, in fact, you're getting quite a bit of the opposite. So I wrote this paper ... I think this ... Is this a Quillette article, I think? Yeah, yeah, yeah. A year or two ago, um, that reviewed a lot of the recent, uh, research on looking at gender biases in psychology, and a lot of the time you see exactly (laughs) the opposite. So people are biased in favor of women across a lot of different domains. They often treat women better than men. They like women better than they like men. Women get punished less than men for the same things. Um, when there's a scientific finding that portrays men better than women, people are biased against it in relation to scientific evidence that portrays women better than men. So people want women to be better than men. Um, and so this idea that society is sexist against women and we have to be vigilant about potential harm to women, um, I think potentially actually stems from the very fact that we care so much more about women than (laughs) we do about men. And when we discover these biases against men, no one really cares and they don't make the headlines. Um, so yeah. Uh, I would say it is largely a myth in modern Western societies, yes.

Is it really possible to answer this question about whether society is more biased against men than women?

That's a good question, and I would say, probably no. Like, practically, it would be really hard to measure all of the different contexts, um, where people potentially could be biased. Uh, so like, some scholars have looked at potential bias against men and women in academia, and they see, for example, it's possible students are slightly biased against women in their teaching evaluations, although hard to know because a lot of these are real evaluations, so it could just be that th- that w- h- (laughs) maybe women aren't as nice teachers, I don't know. Um, um, so people have tried to, like, look at which domains do people have a bias against women or against men. It would be hard to look at everything all at once and say, uh, which direction. But one thing that's been happening that I've seen across a few papers now, including one of my own papers that's coming out, is that a lot of these biases actually used to favor men, like, for example, in hiring for male stereotypical jobs. It really was the case that people used to be discriminating against women in those jobs. Um, and a lot of these things seem to have flipped around 20, 2009. (laughs) So a lot of the biases that used to favor men now favor women, and a lot of the biases that always favor women still favor women. So I do think, uh ... I, I don't know if we can say on whole who gets treated worse relative to the other gender, um, but certainly, it seems to be the trajectory that biases are increasingly in fav- favoring women and then people just don't seem to care as much about that as when they, uh, seem to go against women.