“You’re Going to Let a Girl Beat You?”

I’m sure that at some point in our lives, everyone has come across this phrase, be it as children on the playground, sibling rivalry, or even ‘friendly’ competition between adults. As the youngest of four children, the oldest two boys and the youngest girls, this phrase was a common occurrence around our house. It wasn’t meant in outright disrespect of the girls, but more of a jab at the boys. “You’re sisters are girls and younger than you and they can do it.” We know how this type of language affects boys, but what about the girls that hear this even if it’s not directed towards them?

We know that women are catching up, and even surpassing men recently, in many academic achievements. Girls maintain higher grade point averages and even exceed boys’ enrollment in college according to recent data. Then why, if our girls’ are so smart, if the proportion of women in cooperate America so small? There is no single widely accepted answer to this problem, but in her book Pink Brain, Blue Brian Lise Eliot offers a few possible answers.

In discussing the differences in competition between he sexes, Eliot brings up some obvious but commonly overlooked points. Competition requires aggression, and as Eliot points out, aggression is generally stigmatized as unfeminine. Girls don’t fight, they share; boys are the ones wrestling over toy trains and blocks. We’ve heard this over and over again, any time you turn on the TV that is the general picture that is painted of children in America. You would think that if this was something so engrained in women that there surely would be a biological basis for it, but even the evidence for that is weak. If women aren’t born non-competitive, then we must learn this at some point. The true question now, is how young are our daughters getting this message and how can we stop it.

Researchers Rothgerber and Wolsiefer have begun to decipher when girls are learning this stereotype, and when is it starting to truly show an affect. Taking the experiment out of the lab, they analyzed the statistics of 12 past scholastic chess tournaments. Here the girls did not know they were being analyzed, and thus acted as they normally would. Calculating the girls probability to win, and after matching the girls’ ranking to a comparable (in age and skill) boys’ ranking a pattern soon became apparent. Girls were losing, not because they were bad at chess, but purely because they were playing against a boy. Over all, girls only achieved 83% of the expected victories they should have. The girls were aware of the stereotype that boys are naturally better than girls at chess and it truly affected their ability to win. When matched against a male opponent that was seen as stronger at chess, the numbers plummeted even further; girls only won 56% of the games they were expected to win. If this is something girls learn, then they are learning early and it is sticking with them through life. 

Sit your daughter down in front of the chess set and encourage her, not just to challenger her brother, but to win too.

References

Eliot, L. (2009). Pink brain, blue brain: How small differences grow into troublesome gaps- and what we can do about it.  New York, NY: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

Rothgerber, H., & Wolsiefer, K. (2014). A naturalistic study of stereotype threat in young female chess players. Group Processes & Intergroup Relations, 17, 79-90. doi:10.1177/1368430213490212