Audio Script
But you don’t look like a scientist April 7, 2016 Sarah Banchefsky For decades much has been written that many people - regardless of gender – believe that femininity in a woman is seen as incompatible with being a scientist. Now two new CU-Boulder studies confirm that there is a bias as to whether an attractive, feminine looking woman can be taken seriously as a scientist, says Sarah Banchefsky, a research associate in the Department of Psychology and Neuroscience. CUT 1 “The two studies we did were very similar in their conclusions. So we got really nice replication where we see that when people judge a woman as being more feminine in appearance they also view her as less likely to be a scientist. (:14) So I think one possibility is it simply just doesn’t fit people’s stereotypic image in their mind of what an engineer looks like and so they generally feel surprised and don’t think that it’s possible that a feminine woman could be in these careers.” (:27) For one study researchers had participants look at 80 photos of men and women who are scientists. Naïve to the targets’ occupations, participants rated the photos on femininity and the likelihood of being a scientist. While all feminine appearing women were graded unlikely to be a scientist, men from the photos, regardless of whether they had a feminine appearance, were graded likely to be scientists. CUT 3 “So for the male scientists their masculine to feminine appearance had no impact at all on the perceived likelihood that they are a scientist. And both studies found that.” (:10) In the other study instead of asking participants to evaluate people’s masculine to feminine appearance researchers only asked how likely it was that this person is a scientist. CUT 3 “And what we see is when we relate that set of participants, when we relate their judgments of career likelihood to a completely different group of participants, judgments of that person’s appearance, we get the same exact relationship. (:12) Which suggests that we don’t have to be consciously thinking about an individual’s femininity and relating that to judgments about their career. It’s something that happens automatically.” (:24) Banchefsky published her findings in the journal Sex Roles. The paper, “But You Don’t Look Like a Scientist!: Women Scientists with Feminine Appearance are Deemed Less Likely to be Scientists,” opens with the story of engineer Isis Wenger whose photo was featured in her tech firm’s recruiting ad but because she was deemed “too attractive” to be a “real engineer,” some who saw the ad doubted its veracity. CUT 4 “People believed that she really couldn’t be an engineer simply because she looked too attractive or too feminine to be one. (:07) And so she experienced quite a bit of backlash online, on Facebook, with people saying, ‘This is a fake campaign.’ ‘She must be just a model.’ ‘She couldn’t possibly be a real engineer,’ because her photo didn’t fit people’s understanding of what an engineer is supposed to look like.” (:24) Wenger was so surprised by the comments that she took to social media and created a campaign to create awareness about the bias toward women scientists. CUT 5 “She was kind of taken aback by this experience and she wrote a blog post where she took another photo of herself and held up this sign that said, ‘I am an engineer’ with this company with the hashtag, ‘#ilooklikeanengineer’ (:14) And basically this blog post made this hashtag go viral on Twitter and there are now hundreds of different people - women and men - who have posted their photos and their accomplishments using that hashtag - I look like an engineer. (:26) To streamline the studies, only photos of white scientists were used. Banchefsky says she hopes to expand the work in the future to examine racial biases against “feminine” scientists in the field and lab and identify what factors participants deemed “attractive” or feminine. -CU- 
