The Reverse Matilda Effect

Sex ratios and perceptions of prestige

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The push to get women into male-dominated industries is not matched by similar efforts to get men into female-dominated industries. Why is this? 

One reason, of course, is that positions of power and prestige have historically been more likely to be occupied by men. 

But there's an interesting and pernicious reason for why there is no push in the opposite direction to get men into female-dominated industries:

Society tends to view activities that men do as being more valuable, and activities that women do as less valuable.

This is the reason why Boy Scouts opened to girls, but Girl Scouts did not open to boys. Many female college students have expressed desire to make fraternities co-ed in order to join them, but few (perhaps zero) male students have expressed any desire to join sororities. There’s a push to get more women into combat roles in the military, but no equivalent push to hire more male nurses. 

This is perhaps my most speculative thought in this post, but I have wondered if the reason why some people want trans individuals to compete in women’s sports is because having a biological male in the arena somehow elevates the value of the competitive activity.

The conventional view is that men are more likely to occupy a powerful or prestigious position. As a weird extension of this, people then infer that if a man is doing something, then therefore it must be powerful or prestigious. This also implies that if a woman is doing something, people infer it is not. 

This has resulted in an ironic system in which people (perhaps unconsciously) view male-dominated activities as inherently more valuable and traditionally female activities are inherently less valuable. They then encourage girls and women to pursue "male" activities but do not express the same level of excitement to encourage boys and men to enter female-dominated jobs. 

Homemaking and childrearing are very valuable activities. Yet, among upper-middle-class people, no one (male or female) is actively encouraged to do it. It's tacitly considered a "waste of talent.” Or something along those lines. Even enlightened and progressive couples who split housework and childrearing 50/50 think of it as splitting an undesirable and less valuable duty, accepting a "compromise" to their more “valuable” careers outside the home.

What I find interesting is how this value system subtly supports the existing state of affairs, where any labor that isn’t taxed is devalued. Many people have difficulty escaping this way of thinking, with some describing a parent raising his or her own child as “unpaid labor.” Which is a twisted way of thinking about taking care of your family. As if money for “paid labor” is the only form of value that exists. 

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This idea that people unconsciously devalue domains where women predominate has been lingering in my mind but only recently has there been empirical evidence for it. 

A recently published study found experimental evidence that showcasing women's contributions seems to make STEM fields less attractive to male and female high school students.

In other words, seeing women’s accomplishments in various STEM fields led both girls and boys to see those academic fields as less interesting and worthy of study. The researchers state that “people think that if women excel in certain fields, then those fields must be less valuable than others.” 

The researchers reference the Matilda Effect—the tendency to under-recognize and undervalue women’s contributions to research and scientific discovery. They describe their findings as a “reverse Matilda Effect,” because they suggest that if a woman contributes to a field, then therefore it is relatively less valuable. 

This finding is consistent with another study. The researchers found that people assume that men, in particular, will be less interested in any career that is majority female. They ruled out the possibility that people assume men aren’t interested in female-dominated fields because such fields pay less, concluding “gender representation in careers (and not salary) is the key factor.” 

These assumptions aren’t unfounded. In Don't Trust Your Gut: Using Data to Get What You Really Want in Life, Seth Stephens-Davidowitz reports that men who work in male-dominated fields have more success on dating sites compared with men in less “manly” career fields who earn similar incomes, have similar educations, and are equally attractive, and are of the same height. 

This pattern extends beyond dating. For men, there seems to be a marriage penalty for holding a gender atypical job. Men’s odds of marriage decrease when they work in predominantly female occupations (e.g., receptionist, nursing aid, restaurant server) when compared with working in predominantly male occupations (e.g., mechanic, driver, police) or in a sex-balanced occupation. The researchers controlled for income. Women’s odds of marriage were unrelated to the sex composition of their occupation. 

So perhaps it’s a good thing that there’s no push to get men into female-dominated jobs–it might reduce their odds of finding a romantic partner. For women, there is no attractiveness penalty for whatever job they obtain. 

I’m curious about whether this general pattern will hold for higher education—the pattern that as women dominate a given field, the field subsequently loses perceived value. A decade ago, an article in The Atlantic stated that “If male enrollment falls to 40 percent or below, female students begin to flee.” One reason for this is that in addition to receiving an education, people also want to go to college to meet romantic partners. Another reason, though, might be the perception that if there aren’t many men on campus, the college isn’t worth attending.

Sixty percent of college students are now women. I recently checked the latest stats for both the Rhodes Scholarship (postgraduate award to study at Oxford) and the Gates Cambridge Scholarship (postgraduate award to study at Cambridge). The most recent cohorts for both are between 60-70 percent female. 

Higher education is losing support among the public. Just 36 percent of Americans now say they have significant confidence in higher education, down from 57 percent less than a decade ago.

Perhaps it’s just a coincidence that the declining prestige of colleges and universities has coincided with a declining ratio of men in higher education. Perhaps not.