A Different Study Another woman suggested to me today that yet another study might examine the ages of the participants in the competition study. She clearly has more faith in the progress of humanity than I do.  ¶ 6:56 PM 0 Comments

  Stayin' Alive It has been nearly a year and I'm still here, still in remission, and ready to move on from cancer to more interesting topics . . . like women in the workplace. I have been particularly interested in this subject since Larry Sommers expressed his views and since I attended an Advanced Mediation Training seminar in federal court in Los Angeles attended by 45 men and 5 women (this despite the fact that my graduating class from Columbia Law School in 1983 was nearly 50% women).


It took me 20 minutes to dig up this study that I read about in the New York Times because typing in search terms like "women work Stanford" or "women career success" only led to stories about how women with more education 1) sleep better or 2) should work the night shift to give the kids the benefit of more dad time.

When I was at Harvard as an undergraduate, Matina Horner called it "fear of success." (I called it "love of pinball".) Now they call it "aversion to competitive environments." Is it really surprising, though, that women who are conditioned from childhood to avoid confrontation choose not to compete in a so-called "tournament"? (It also seems significant that men significantly overestimated their relative performance: 75% of men thought that they were the best in their group of four, vs. 43% of the women).

What may be significant about the competitive environments study is that it examined grown women. I wonder if the results would be different if it studied the same behaviors beginning at age 5. Or how about studying the same girls and boys beginning at age 5 through adulthood for these behaviors. Those results might be more surprising.  ¶ 12:50 PM 0 Comments