94 Chapter 3Research supports the shifting standard.
In one study, college students were shown
the same favorable letter of recommendation
(“good student”) written by a male physics
professor and were told (a) nothing about the
professor, (b) that the professor was sexist, or
(c) that the professor was antisexist (i.e., pro-
motes women; Biernat & Eidelman, 2007).
Students were asked to indicate what they think
the letter writerreallythinks of the student’s
academic ability. In the sexist and control con-
ditions, students rated the male’s ability higher
than the female’s ability, whereas there were no
differences in the nonsexist condition. The au-
thors concluded that “good” means less good
for females than males in the absence of in-
formation and when the person was explicitly
stated to be sexist. In this case, females are held
to a lower standard than males.
The shifting standard makes it difficult to
compare women’s and men’s behavior because
we have different standards for defining a be-
havior displayed by a man versus a woman. Be-
havior that is similar may appear to be different
because of shifting standards, as in the study
just described. A real-life example of the shift-
ing standard is the media attention that was de-
voted to a couple of cases of aggressive behavior
in women’s sports. In 2009, Serena Williams’s
angry outburst with a lineswoman led to a
penalty at match point, causing her to lose the
semifinals at the U. S. Open tennis tournament
(Te l e g r a p h, 2009). In 2010, Elizabeth Lambert, a
soccer player from the University of New Mex-
ico, was suspended indefinitely for shoving,
punching, tripping, and pulling an opponent
down to the ground by her ponytail (Longman,
2009). It is not that these aggressive behaviors
should go unpunished. The point is that they
were viewed as especially aggressive because
they were displayed by women and inconsis-
tent with the female gender role. The former
coach of the U.S. men’s national soccer team,
Bruce Arena, seemed to recognize this. He said,and some men are more emotional than the
average woman.
Some research suggests that our gender-
role stereotypes are accurate. Hall and Carter
(1999) conducted a study examining 77 traits
and behaviors among five samples of college
students. Students’ perceptions of the magni-
tude of sex differences were compared to the
research findings. On the whole, students were
quite accurate. However, there was some vari-
ability in accuracy—the students who viewed
themselves as more stereotypical were less ac-
curate in their beliefs about women and men.
One problem with this area of research
is that it is difficult to test the accuracy of
many components of gender-role stereotypes
because we do not have objective measures
of many traits and behavior. For example, we
can determine objectively that men, on aver-
age, are taller than women, but how would we
determine whether men are more indepen-
dent than women? This is a difficult task be-
cause of theshifting standard(Biernat, 2003).
The shifting standard is the idea that we might
have one standard for defining a behavior for
one group, but another standard for defin-
ing the behavior in another group. Have you
ever heard the phrase (or, dare I say, used the
phrase) “she hits well,for a girl”? The idea is
that you hold the same behavior to different
standards for females and males. A certain
level of skill at baseball may be regarded as
good if the person with the bat is female but
only average if the person with the bat is male.
Just as the standards for female and male ath-
letes may not be the same, the standards for
female and male nurturance may not be the
same. You might have regarded a man as a
“great dad” because he spends some of his
leisure time playing with his kids and taking
them shopping. That same behavior may not
signify a “great mom,” however. Thus it is
very difficult to compare men and women on
a dimension if different standards are used.M03_HELG0185_04_SE_C03.indd 94 6/21/11 12:22 PM