tone the testosterone down. Seriously, the year before this was not...
[like that].” Of the other women panelists, she notes, “We tend to de-
fer a little and maybe not be as assertive as perhaps we’d like to
be.WhenIget...inasituation with a hard-hitting male, I just want
to not say anything. It’s like, ‘I’m not playing this game.’ I don’t want
to perform, I just want to do my thing and try to do as good a job
as I can.”
A final determinant of personal influence is whether a panelist is
perceived by others as having similar standards. This is suggested by
a history professor who explains how her appreciation of a co-panel-
ist was rooted in shared theoretical frameworks:
There were just a couple of cases where she and I agreed and we
together disagreed with others, and I remember feeling pleased
about that, although I really felt quite at peace and attuned to the
whole panel. I felt that we understood each other quite well...
She and I share a post-structuralist intellectual background and
perhaps for that reason we share a liking for those projects that
took problems that had previously been considered in a binary
framework and did something creative with that...Shehasa
way of framing problems [using] very broad terms that are not
just drawn from her field. I mean, she really reaches out to the
humanities for philosophy and all kinds of frameworks that were
familiar to me. So I had a good appreciation of her knowledge
base and her approach to things. In some respects, that made the
conversation much better because I knew where she was coming
from...WhenIsawthat she had given a proposal a high mark, it
encouraged me to spend some time explaining why I thought it
was really good.This panelist’s admission that her co-panelist’s high opinion of a
particular proposal “encouraged me to spend some time explaining
150 / Pragmatic Fairness