There are two schools of thought when it comes to what fuels the gender pay gap. Feminists tend to point to systematic discrimination, arguing that through various means over the course of women's lives, they are pushed out of higher-paid work into underpaid or unpaid labor. Anti-feminists argue that women themselves are the problem, suggesting that women tend to be too dull, lazy or frivolous to compete with men and choose instead to take on less challenging careers or a life of domesticity.
"Women, far more than men, appear to be drawn to jobs in the caring professions; and men are more likely to turn up in people-free zones," anti-feminist Christina Hoff Sommers has written, without interrogating why "caring" professions are routinely underpaid. (Probably because they're largely done by women.)
"Want to close wage gap? Step one: Change your major from feminist dance therapy to electrical engineering," she tweeted in 2015, in a snottier version of the argument that made clear her view that women simply are duller and lazier than men.
But what happens to women when they take Sommers' advice, and apply themselves energetically in college? A new study to be published in April's American Sociological Review shows that potential employers often hold that against them. For women who pick a traditionally "masculine" major, like math or the physical sciences, the discrimination they face for being a high achiever is even greater.
“There’s been a lot of research in sociology about how women now earn more college degrees than men, so it’s more likely for women to go to college than men and also to graduate," Natasha Quadlin, an assistant professor of sociology at Ohio State University, told Salon. "But there’s still lots of documented evidence of gender inequalities in the workplace and in society more broadly."
So Quadlin decided to study whether and how employers reacted to men's and women's reported GPAs when college graduates were looking for their first job in the adult workforce. First, she submitted over 2,000 applications — varied by GPA, major, and gender — to a job website and recorded which résumés led to callbacks. What she found was that GPA didn't really matter for men, but for women, having a "too high" GPA actually depressed the number of callbacks. It was worse for women with math and science majors.
For instance, nearly the same percentage of men and women, around 15 percent, got callbacks if they said they were math majors with a B average. But for math majors with an A average? Almost a quarter of the men got callbacks, but fewer than 1 in ten women did. The effect was less pronounced with English and business majors, but again, women were significantly more likely to get a callback if they were B students than A students.
"As a result, high-achieving men are called back significantly more often than high-achieving women — at a rate of nearly 2-to-1," Quadlin writes in her paper. High-achieving men with math majors, she continues, "are called back three times as often as their woman counterparts."
In the second part of the study, Quadlin did an in-depth survey, asking potential employers to peruse résumés and explain their decision-making process. She found that male and female job candidates were evaluated very differently.
“It seems to be that when employers rated men as competent and committed to their jobs, they were more likely to call them back," she told Salon. "But they were more likely to call women back when they perceived them as likable.”
For a lot of people, it seems, a woman with a high GPA is assumed not to be likable. One potential employer, looking at the résumé for a woman with A grades, said she seemed "overconfident" and did not appear "socially warm."
Any smart woman who has failed at some point to hide her intelligence is likely familiar with this reaction, but the nation at large got to see how much women get punished for daring to have acumen during the 2016 presidential campaign, when Hillary Clinton was repeatedly disparaged, both on the left and the right, for her wonkiness.
“Hillary Clinton was at times, you could argue, even overprepared," Chuck Todd said on MSNBC after the first presidential debate in September 2016. "And her opening statement must have had 15 policy proposals within that two minutes."
The fact that we elected a half-literate racist reality TV star instead of an "overprepared" woman is a testament to how much damage this hostility to female achievement can cause. But that hostility also helps explain why progress toward gender equality has slowed down or stalled, as a new report from the Stanford Center on Poverty and Inequality shows, even though women are striving harder by going to college more.
These findings should also help debunk the contemptuous dismissal of women's life choices by people like Christina Hoff Sommers. It's still true that fewer women than men take on math and science majors, but this research suggests that might be a rational response to a world that stigmatizes women who are perceived as highly intelligent. That "feminist dance therapy" major might be easier than the engineering degree, but it also is less likely to get you called "arrogant," as one of Quadlin's study volunteers said when examining a high-achieving woman's résumé.
Despite all this, Quadlin said, "I don’t want women to be discouraged from trying to achieve in college."
Graduate programs like medical school or law school, she pointed out, still put a premium on good grades. More importantly, she said, "The people who are more willing to hire high-achieving women are the ones that will be great advocates for you throughout your career."
The larger challenge for our society is to keep fighting the sexist stereotypes that hold that women can be smart or likable, but not both. Employers should be aware of these kinds of prejudices and find ways, such blind hiring, to avoid penalizing women for their skills and their achievement. No one should feel the need to downplay their intelligence to get ahead.
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