Gender Studies and Sociology

Directions: The question below is followed by two arguments numbered I and II. You have to decide which of the given arguments is/are ‘strong'.

Do teachers favour their own gender in coeducational schools?

Arguments: I. Yes, as gender bias is a major problem at all levels of schooling. II. No, as there is little evidence to support this claim.

S1 The Asia region continues to grapple with a particular and premeditated form of violence against women, that is, the sex-selective abortion of female foetuses. P. However, gender violence has received focused attention only over the past two decades.
Q. It has distorted the gender ratios of the population in the 0-6 year age-group. R. A worrisome aspect of this phenomenon is the extent to which it reinforces traditional stereotypes over generations. S. The mitigation of different forms of inequalities between men and women has engaged the attention of the international community over a relatively longer period. S6 Hence, the comprehension of its various dimensions and the codification of laws are as yet in the early stages of evolution.

Directions: In the following question the first and the last sentence are marked S1 and S6. The rest of the passage is split into four parts and named PQRS. These parts are not given in their correct order. Read the sentences carefully and find out which of the following orders is correct.

The following are the variations of the policies followed under the feminist movement except ______________________.

Directions: Answer the question based on the following passage.

Wonder Woman. Wonder Woman, in fact, has a complicated, even schizophrenic, heritage. She’s been portrayed by such diverse actors as the perky Cathy Lee Crosby and Lynda Carter, who endowed her with both a competent, working woman aura and a dose of eroticism (Lynda Carter, I discovered, is the subject of a lot of Wonder Woman fetishist erotica on the Internet these days). An Internet poll about who should play Wonder Woman, if the series were revived today, uncovered equally diverse ideas— people suggested Cher, Lucy Lawless, Angela Bassett, and Demi Moore. Clearly, in our cultural imagination, Wonder Woman is a character with many faces.

Things only get more complicated when you consider the frame narrative that explains 10 Wonder Woman’s existence. She was born as Princess Diana (interestingly paralleling another icon of womanhood) in an Amazon community that seems pretty clearly grounded in lesbianism. Although the women in this harmonious and idyllic Amazon community have gone to great lengths to hide and protect their island from incursions by men, they are nonetheless delighted when a male American army officer inadvertently crash-lands in their utopia. So smitten with him are they, in fact, that they stage a ruthless physical competition to decide who will get to pair off with him. When Diana (later Wonder Woman) wins, she happily abandons her position as a royal ruler of the Amazons to accompany him back to the United States and take a boring desk job as a lowly secretary in the army. She even trades in her cool Amazon garb for a pair of glasses 20and a meek, submissive manner.

Of course, these good-girl accoutrements can’t hold Wonder Woman’s Amazon nature in check. Faced with evil or danger, she spins herself into a wild tornado and emerges in her glamorous (though seemingly impractical) star-spangled swimsuit and kinky, high-heeled go-go boots. She skillfully pilots an invisible airplane, wields a golden lasso, and fends off bullets with her wristbands made of a mysterious metal called “feminum.” In the name of the “forces of justice and freedom,” Wonder Woman will scrap with just about anyone— originally created to fight Nazis, she actually goes on to replicate their white-supremacist doctrines, killing off Japanese people whom her comic book portrays as demonic, and fighting to the death against her African double, Nubia. In a recent comic 30book, she completely abandons the apparently socialist tenets of the Amazons and emerges as a champion of capitalist entrepreneurialism, saving a trendy, financially lucrative urban bistro from the machinations of a computer geek. To quote the superhero herself, “Great Hera!” —can’t she get her politics straight?

Of course, all of these contradictions within Wonder Woman point to the evolution of and contradictions within our social constructions of womanhood. One of the founding principles of feminist criticism is the need to be conscious of the ways that gender is a constructed category, to realize that there is nothing inherent or essential about what we associate with the feminine. As first-wave feminist Simone de Beauvoir put it, “One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman; . . . it is civilization as a whole that produces this 40creature which is described as feminine.” But beyond this foundational acknowledgement of social construction (and even this concept is debated within feminism) and a general concern with the effects of power, there is little that binds what we call “feminist criticism” into a homogeneous, or even very coherent, doctrine. There are Marxist feminists who are concerned with the way economic oppression coincides with gender; linguistically based feminists who are interested in uncovering how the very structure of language itself betrays a masculine bias and in finding new modes of expression to better accommodate women. There are feminists who look for evidence of subversive resistance and empowerment in the history of women and feminists who are interested in tracing oppression and victimization.

50Feminist criticism is expanding into a more general level to include such areas as the construction of masculinity and the constitution of sexual orientation. It is being infused with insights from the realm of Queer Theory complicated by post-colonial scholars and scholars of race who consider the ways gender intersects with nationalism, class, and race. As feminist critic Theresa de Lauretis suggests, “A new conception of the subject is, in fact, emerging from feminist analyses of women’s heterogeneous subjectivity and multiple identities . . . the differences among women may be better understood as differences within women.” It is important to realize that not only does feminism as a movement exist in the face of these contradictions and complications—within feminist criticism, within gender studies, within individual literary texts and within our 60understanding of the individual woman as a subject—but that it cannot exist without them. Perhaps, like Wonder Woman, feminist criticism remains vital because it is astonishingly diverse, open, and rigorously self-problematizing.

Which of the following statements can be best inferred from the lines “A new conception of the subject........as differences within women”?

Directions: Answer the question based on the following passage.

Wonder Woman. Wonder Woman, in fact, has a complicated, even schizophrenic, heritage. She’s been portrayed by such diverse actors as the perky Cathy Lee Crosby and Lynda Carter, who endowed her with both a competent, working woman aura and a dose of eroticism (Lynda Carter, I discovered, is the subject of a lot of Wonder Woman fetishist erotica on the Internet these days). An Internet poll about who should play Wonder Woman, if the series were revived today, uncovered equally diverse ideas— people suggested Cher, Lucy Lawless, Angela Bassett, and Demi Moore. Clearly, in our cultural imagination, Wonder Woman is a character with many faces.

Things only get more complicated when you consider the frame narrative that explains 10 Wonder Woman’s existence. She was born as Princess Diana (interestingly paralleling another icon of womanhood) in an Amazon community that seems pretty clearly grounded in lesbianism. Although the women in this harmonious and idyllic Amazon community have gone to great lengths to hide and protect their island from incursions by men, they are nonetheless delighted when a male American army officer inadvertently crash-lands in their utopia. So smitten with him are they, in fact, that they stage a ruthless physical competition to decide who will get to pair off with him. When Diana (later Wonder Woman) wins, she happily abandons her position as a royal ruler of the Amazons to accompany him back to the United States and take a boring desk job as a lowly secretary in the army. She even trades in her cool Amazon garb for a pair of glasses 20and a meek, submissive manner.

Of course, these good-girl accoutrements can’t hold Wonder Woman’s Amazon nature in check. Faced with evil or danger, she spins herself into a wild tornado and emerges in her glamorous (though seemingly impractical) star-spangled swimsuit and kinky, high-heeled go-go boots. She skillfully pilots an invisible airplane, wields a golden lasso, and fends off bullets with her wristbands made of a mysterious metal called “feminum.” In the name of the “forces of justice and freedom,” Wonder Woman will scrap with just about anyone— originally created to fight Nazis, she actually goes on to replicate their white-supremacist doctrines, killing off Japanese people whom her comic book portrays as demonic, and fighting to the death against her African double, Nubia. In a recent comic 30book, she completely abandons the apparently socialist tenets of the Amazons and emerges as a champion of capitalist entrepreneurialism, saving a trendy, financially lucrative urban bistro from the machinations of a computer geek. To quote the superhero herself, “Great Hera!” —can’t she get her politics straight?

Of course, all of these contradictions within Wonder Woman point to the evolution of and contradictions within our social constructions of womanhood. One of the founding principles of feminist criticism is the need to be conscious of the ways that gender is a constructed category, to realize that there is nothing inherent or essential about what we associate with the feminine. As first-wave feminist Simone de Beauvoir put it, “One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman; . . . it is civilization as a whole that produces this 40creature which is described as feminine.” But beyond this foundational acknowledgement of social construction (and even this concept is debated within feminism) and a general concern with the effects of power, there is little that binds what we call “feminist criticism” into a homogeneous, or even very coherent, doctrine. There are Marxist feminists who are concerned with the way economic oppression coincides with gender; linguistically based feminists who are interested in uncovering how the very structure of language itself betrays a masculine bias and in finding new modes of expression to better accommodate women. There are feminists who look for evidence of subversive resistance and empowerment in the history of women and feminists who are interested in tracing oppression and victimization.

50Feminist criticism is expanding into a more general level to include such areas as the construction of masculinity and the constitution of sexual orientation. It is being infused with insights from the realm of Queer Theory complicated by post-colonial scholars and scholars of race who consider the ways gender intersects with nationalism, class, and race. As feminist critic Theresa de Lauretis suggests, “A new conception of the subject is, in fact, emerging from feminist analyses of women’s heterogeneous subjectivity and multiple identities . . . the differences among women may be better understood as differences within women.” It is important to realize that not only does feminism as a movement exist in the face of these contradictions and complications—within feminist criticism, within gender studies, within individual literary texts and within our 60understanding of the individual woman as a subject—but that it cannot exist without them. Perhaps, like Wonder Woman, feminist criticism remains vital because it is astonishingly diverse, open, and rigorously self-problematizing.

What term can be given to a customary predilection?

Directions: Answer the question based on the following passage.

Women's lack of progress in academe is well documented: in its 1999-2000 report, the AAUP's Committee on the Economic Status of the Profession found "sinking evidence of a distorted gender distribution by rank." Women are more likely than men to end up in low-paid, non-tenure-track positions that are often a dead end. Women who do manage to secure tenure-track jobs are less likely than men to be at four-year colleges; those at four-year institutions are less likely to be at highly ranked research universities. Why?

Part of the problem is gender bias, of two different types. The more familiar is the "glass ceiling" that prevents successful women from reaching the summit of their professions. What exactly is the glass ceiling? Usually, it is defined demographically by documenting the dearth of women at the top. That is why there is a dearth of women, when most academics-men as well as women-see themselves as committed to gender equality. Little information exists to help academic administrators who are determined to give women a fair shake.

In addition, many women never get near the glass ceiling because of the "maternal wall," a type of gender bias I described in a 2004 article in Employee Rights and Employment Policy Law Review. Like the glass ceiling, the maternal wall is documented demographically by showing the dearth of mothers in desirable faculty jobs. Women who have children soon after receiving their PhDs are much less likely to achieve tenure than men who have children at the same point in their careers. About 45 percent of tenured women are childless, according to University of California, Berkeley, Dean Mary Ann Mason, whose article with UC Berkeley researcher Marc Goulden appears elsewhere in this issue. The high percentage of women without children may well be linked to "bias avoidance": the attempt to avoid the maternal wall by deferring or avoiding having children, as documented in economist Robert Drago's important work.

Again, demographic documentation of the maternal wall gives well-meaning administrators little guidance on how it arises. Depressing demography does not give much guidance on how to avoid more depressing demography in the future. This article does. It describes, in lay terms, the patterns of stereotyping and gender bias that create the glass ceiling and the maternal wall. Drawing on a review of over one hundred studies, it presents the latest findings of empirical social psychology in readily usable form.

The "commonsense" view of stereotyping is of an employer who misuses demography by assuming, for example, that because mothers as a group cut back their hours after they have kids, a particular woman will do so. Economists call this thinking "statistical discrimination"; social psychologists call it "descriptive stereotyping." When an employer disadvantages women by assuming they will conform to a stereotype, "cognitive bias" is often involved. The term refers to the insight that much bias-based on gender, race, and other social categories-stems from the ways in which stereotypes shape perception, memory, and inferences.

Another kind of stereotyping, described by business school professor Diana Burgess and social psychologist Eugene Dorgida is "prescriptive stereotyping." Such stereotyping doesn't just assume stereotypical behavior; it tries to require it. In one case, Bailey v. Scott-Gallaher, Inc., an employer fired an employee who sought to return from maternity leave on the grounds that mothers should stay at home until their children are grown.

Stereotypes often produce relatively small differences, but they add up over time. According to social psychologist Virginia Valian, "Success is largely the accumulation of advantage, exploiting small gains to get bigger ones." One experiment by Valian set up a model that built in a tiny bin in favor of promoting men; after a while, 65 percent of top-level employees were male. Conversely, the "accumulation of disadvantage" for women creates very real job detriments.

The glass ceiling is composed of two different patterns. One makes it harder for women to be perceived as competent. Women's successful performance tends to be more closely scrutinized, and assessed by stricter standards than men's. Men also have to give more convincing demonstrations of incompetence to be judged incompetent overall, according to social psychologist Martha Foschi.

Women's struggle to establish competence is exacerbated both by the exercise of discretion and in the way that supposedly objective rules are applied. Studies by Marilyn Brewer have shown that when applying objective rules, men tend to create exceptions for men or to give them "the benefit of the doubt," a pattern called "leniency bias." To quote Brewer, "Coldly objective judgment seems to be reserved for members of out groups." For example, a search committee may require "all candidates" to have their dissertations completed, only to waive this requirement for a young man who comes with the "right recommendations" and "shows great promise." Indeed, social psychologists have documented that men tend to be judged on whether they show promise, whereas women in similar circumstances are often judged strictly on what they have actually accomplished.

Kay Deaux and Kim Emswiller have also shown that people tend to attribute their own behavior, or that of their in group, to stable causes, while they attribute the behavior of out groups to situational causes: he's brilliant, but she just got lucky. This tendency is called "attribution bias."

In addition, facts that fit a given stereotype are more accurately recalled than facts that do not, a pattern called "recall bias." Members of an in group are more likely to recall undesirable behavior committed by members of an out group than by in-group members. As a result, women professionals may have to try harder than men to be perceived as competent because their mistakes are remembered long after men's are forgotten.

What makes 'Wonder Woman' relevant?

Directions: Answer the question based on the following passage.

Wonder Woman. Wonder Woman, in fact, has a complicated, even schizophrenic, heritage. She’s been portrayed by such diverse actors as the perky Cathy Lee Crosby and Lynda Carter, who endowed her with both a competent, working woman aura and a dose of eroticism (Lynda Carter, I discovered, is the subject of a lot of Wonder Woman fetishist erotica on the Internet these days). An Internet poll about who should play Wonder Woman, if the series were revived today, uncovered equally diverse ideas— people suggested Cher, Lucy Lawless, Angela Bassett, and Demi Moore. Clearly, in our cultural imagination, Wonder Woman is a character with many faces.

Things only get more complicated when you consider the frame narrative that explains 10 Wonder Woman’s existence. She was born as Princess Diana (interestingly paralleling another icon of womanhood) in an Amazon community that seems pretty clearly grounded in lesbianism. Although the women in this harmonious and idyllic Amazon community have gone to great lengths to hide and protect their island from incursions by men, they are nonetheless delighted when a male American army officer inadvertently crash-lands in their utopia. So smitten with him are they, in fact, that they stage a ruthless physical competition to decide who will get to pair off with him. When Diana (later Wonder Woman) wins, she happily abandons her position as a royal ruler of the Amazons to accompany him back to the United States and take a boring desk job as a lowly secretary in the army. She even trades in her cool Amazon garb for a pair of glasses 20and a meek, submissive manner.

Of course, these good-girl accoutrements can’t hold Wonder Woman’s Amazon nature in check. Faced with evil or danger, she spins herself into a wild tornado and emerges in her glamorous (though seemingly impractical) star-spangled swimsuit and kinky, high-heeled go-go boots. She skillfully pilots an invisible airplane, wields a golden lasso, and fends off bullets with her wristbands made of a mysterious metal called “feminum.” In the name of the “forces of justice and freedom,” Wonder Woman will scrap with just about anyone— originally created to fight Nazis, she actually goes on to replicate their white-supremacist doctrines, killing off Japanese people whom her comic book portrays as demonic, and fighting to the death against her African double, Nubia. In a recent comic 30book, she completely abandons the apparently socialist tenets of the Amazons and emerges as a champion of capitalist entrepreneurialism, saving a trendy, financially lucrative urban bistro from the machinations of a computer geek. To quote the superhero herself, “Great Hera!” —can’t she get her politics straight?

Of course, all of these contradictions within Wonder Woman point to the evolution of and contradictions within our social constructions of womanhood. One of the founding principles of feminist criticism is the need to be conscious of the ways that gender is a constructed category, to realize that there is nothing inherent or essential about what we associate with the feminine. As first-wave feminist Simone de Beauvoir put it, “One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman; . . . it is civilization as a whole that produces this 40creature which is described as feminine.” But beyond this foundational acknowledgement of social construction (and even this concept is debated within feminism) and a general concern with the effects of power, there is little that binds what we call “feminist criticism” into a homogeneous, or even very coherent, doctrine. There are Marxist feminists who are concerned with the way economic oppression coincides with gender; linguistically based feminists who are interested in uncovering how the very structure of language itself betrays a masculine bias and in finding new modes of expression to better accommodate women. There are feminists who look for evidence of subversive resistance and empowerment in the history of women and feminists who are interested in tracing oppression and victimization.

50Feminist criticism is expanding into a more general level to include such areas as the construction of masculinity and the constitution of sexual orientation. It is being infused with insights from the realm of Queer Theory complicated by post-colonial scholars and scholars of race who consider the ways gender intersects with nationalism, class, and race. As feminist critic Theresa de Lauretis suggests, “A new conception of the subject is, in fact, emerging from feminist analyses of women’s heterogeneous subjectivity and multiple identities . . . the differences among women may be better understood as differences within women.” It is important to realize that not only does feminism as a movement exist in the face of these contradictions and complications—within feminist criticism, within gender studies, within individual literary texts and within our 60understanding of the individual woman as a subject—but that it cannot exist without them. Perhaps, like Wonder Woman, feminist criticism remains vital because it is astonishingly diverse, open, and rigorously self-problematizing.

The tone of the passage is ______________________.

Directions: Answer the question based on the following passage.

Women's lack of progress in academe is well documented: in its 1999-2000 report, the AAUP's Committee on the Economic Status of the Profession found "sinking evidence of a distorted gender distribution by rank." Women are more likely than men to end up in low-paid, non-tenure-track positions that are often a dead end. Women who do manage to secure tenure-track jobs are less likely than men to be at four-year colleges; those at four-year institutions are less likely to be at highly ranked research universities. Why?

Part of the problem is gender bias, of two different types. The more familiar is the "glass ceiling" that prevents successful women from reaching the summit of their professions. What exactly is the glass ceiling? Usually, it is defined demographically by documenting the dearth of women at the top. That is why there is a dearth of women, when most academics-men as well as women-see themselves as committed to gender equality. Little information exists to help academic administrators who are determined to give women a fair shake.

In addition, many women never get near the glass ceiling because of the "maternal wall," a type of gender bias I described in a 2004 article in Employee Rights and Employment Policy Law Review. Like the glass ceiling, the maternal wall is documented demographically by showing the dearth of mothers in desirable faculty jobs. Women who have children soon after receiving their PhDs are much less likely to achieve tenure than men who have children at the same point in their careers. About 45 percent of tenured women are childless, according to University of California, Berkeley, Dean Mary Ann Mason, whose article with UC Berkeley researcher Marc Goulden appears elsewhere in this issue. The high percentage of women without children may well be linked to "bias avoidance": the attempt to avoid the maternal wall by deferring or avoiding having children, as documented in economist Robert Drago's important work.

Again, demographic documentation of the maternal wall gives well-meaning administrators little guidance on how it arises. Depressing demography does not give much guidance on how to avoid more depressing demography in the future. This article does. It describes, in lay terms, the patterns of stereotyping and gender bias that create the glass ceiling and the maternal wall. Drawing on a review of over one hundred studies, it presents the latest findings of empirical social psychology in readily usable form.

The "commonsense" view of stereotyping is of an employer who misuses demography by assuming, for example, that because mothers as a group cut back their hours after they have kids, a particular woman will do so. Economists call this thinking "statistical discrimination"; social psychologists call it "descriptive stereotyping." When an employer disadvantages women by assuming they will conform to a stereotype, "cognitive bias" is often involved. The term refers to the insight that much bias-based on gender, race, and other social categories-stems from the ways in which stereotypes shape perception, memory, and inferences.

Another kind of stereotyping, described by business school professor Diana Burgess and social psychologist Eugene Dorgida is "prescriptive stereotyping." Such stereotyping doesn't just assume stereotypical behavior; it tries to require it. In one case, Bailey v. Scott-Gallaher, Inc., an employer fired an employee who sought to return from maternity leave on the grounds that mothers should stay at home until their children are grown.

Stereotypes often produce relatively small differences, but they add up over time. According to social psychologist Virginia Valian, "Success is largely the accumulation of advantage, exploiting small gains to get bigger ones." One experiment by Valian set up a model that built in a tiny bin in favor of promoting men; after a while, 65 percent of top-level employees were male. Conversely, the "accumulation of disadvantage" for women creates very real job detriments.

The glass ceiling is composed of two different patterns. One makes it harder for women to be perceived as competent. Women's successful performance tends to be more closely scrutinized, and assessed by stricter standards than men's. Men also have to give more convincing demonstrations of incompetence to be judged incompetent overall, according to social psychologist Martha Foschi.

Women's struggle to establish competence is exacerbated both by the exercise of discretion and in the way that supposedly objective rules are applied. Studies by Marilyn Brewer have shown that when applying objective rules, men tend to create exceptions for men or to give them "the benefit of the doubt," a pattern called "leniency bias." To quote Brewer, "Coldly objective judgment seems to be reserved for members of out groups." For example, a search committee may require "all candidates" to have their dissertations completed, only to waive this requirement for a young man who comes with the "right recommendations" and "shows great promise." Indeed, social psychologists have documented that men tend to be judged on whether they show promise, whereas women in similar circumstances are often judged strictly on what they have actually accomplished.

Kay Deaux and Kim Emswiller have also shown that people tend to attribute their own behavior, or that of their in group, to stable causes, while they attribute the behavior of out groups to situational causes: he's brilliant, but she just got lucky. This tendency is called "attribution bias."

In addition, facts that fit a given stereotype are more accurately recalled than facts that do not, a pattern called "recall bias." Members of an in group are more likely to recall undesirable behavior committed by members of an out group than by in-group members. As a result, women professionals may have to try harder than men to be perceived as competent because their mistakes are remembered long after men's are forgotten.

A faulty reconstruction of ideations can also be called _______________.

Directions: Answer the question based on the following passage.

Women's lack of progress in academe is well documented: in its 1999-2000 report, the AAUP's Committee on the Economic Status of the Profession found "sinking evidence of a distorted gender distribution by rank." Women are more likely than men to end up in low-paid, non-tenure-track positions that are often a dead end. Women who do manage to secure tenure-track jobs are less likely than men to be at four-year colleges; those at four-year institutions are less likely to be at highly ranked research universities. Why?

Part of the problem is gender bias, of two different types. The more familiar is the "glass ceiling" that prevents successful women from reaching the summit of their professions. What exactly is the glass ceiling? Usually, it is defined demographically by documenting the dearth of women at the top. That is why there is a dearth of women, when most academics-men as well as women-see themselves as committed to gender equality. Little information exists to help academic administrators who are determined to give women a fair shake.

In addition, many women never get near the glass ceiling because of the "maternal wall," a type of gender bias I described in a 2004 article in Employee Rights and Employment Policy Law Review. Like the glass ceiling, the maternal wall is documented demographically by showing the dearth of mothers in desirable faculty jobs. Women who have children soon after receiving their PhDs are much less likely to achieve tenure than men who have children at the same point in their careers. About 45 percent of tenured women are childless, according to University of California, Berkeley, Dean Mary Ann Mason, whose article with UC Berkeley researcher Marc Goulden appears elsewhere in this issue. The high percentage of women without children may well be linked to "bias avoidance": the attempt to avoid the maternal wall by deferring or avoiding having children, as documented in economist Robert Drago's important work.

Again, demographic documentation of the maternal wall gives well-meaning administrators little guidance on how it arises. Depressing demography does not give much guidance on how to avoid more depressing demography in the future. This article does. It describes, in lay terms, the patterns of stereotyping and gender bias that create the glass ceiling and the maternal wall. Drawing on a review of over one hundred studies, it presents the latest findings of empirical social psychology in readily usable form.

The "commonsense" view of stereotyping is of an employer who misuses demography by assuming, for example, that because mothers as a group cut back their hours after they have kids, a particular woman will do so. Economists call this thinking "statistical discrimination"; social psychologists call it "descriptive stereotyping." When an employer disadvantages women by assuming they will conform to a stereotype, "cognitive bias" is often involved. The term refers to the insight that much bias-based on gender, race, and other social categories-stems from the ways in which stereotypes shape perception, memory, and inferences.

Another kind of stereotyping, described by business school professor Diana Burgess and social psychologist Eugene Dorgida is "prescriptive stereotyping." Such stereotyping doesn't just assume stereotypical behavior; it tries to require it. In one case, Bailey v. Scott-Gallaher, Inc., an employer fired an employee who sought to return from maternity leave on the grounds that mothers should stay at home until their children are grown.

Stereotypes often produce relatively small differences, but they add up over time. According to social psychologist Virginia Valian, "Success is largely the accumulation of advantage, exploiting small gains to get bigger ones." One experiment by Valian set up a model that built in a tiny bin in favor of promoting men; after a while, 65 percent of top-level employees were male. Conversely, the "accumulation of disadvantage" for women creates very real job detriments.

The glass ceiling is composed of two different patterns. One makes it harder for women to be perceived as competent. Women's successful performance tends to be more closely scrutinized, and assessed by stricter standards than men's. Men also have to give more convincing demonstrations of incompetence to be judged incompetent overall, according to social psychologist Martha Foschi.

Women's struggle to establish competence is exacerbated both by the exercise of discretion and in the way that supposedly objective rules are applied. Studies by Marilyn Brewer have shown that when applying objective rules, men tend to create exceptions for men or to give them "the benefit of the doubt," a pattern called "leniency bias." To quote Brewer, "Coldly objective judgment seems to be reserved for members of out groups." For example, a search committee may require "all candidates" to have their dissertations completed, only to waive this requirement for a young man who comes with the "right recommendations" and "shows great promise." Indeed, social psychologists have documented that men tend to be judged on whether they show promise, whereas women in similar circumstances are often judged strictly on what they have actually accomplished.

Kay Deaux and Kim Emswiller have also shown that people tend to attribute their own behavior, or that of their in group, to stable causes, while they attribute the behavior of out groups to situational causes: he's brilliant, but she just got lucky. This tendency is called "attribution bias."

In addition, facts that fit a given stereotype are more accurately recalled than facts that do not, a pattern called "recall bias." Members of an in group are more likely to recall undesirable behavior committed by members of an out group than by in-group members. As a result, women professionals may have to try harder than men to be perceived as competent because their mistakes are remembered long after men's are forgotten.