Via
txvoodoo:
Where women are under-represented, men see over-representation:
Davis cited a recent study that examined the ratio of men and women in groups, explaining that researchers “found that if there's 17 percent women, the men in the group think it's 50-50. And if there's 33 percent women, the men perceive that as there being more women in the room than men.”
It was a long time ago, but I seem to recall a study showing that teachers who think they're calling equally on girls and boys are actually calling on boys more often.
There are other studies that reveal similar findings. One of them, which looked at gender parity in the workforce, showed that men “consistently perceive more gender parity” in workplaces than their female colleagues do. Another study showed that men are so used to dominating the discourse in a mixed-gender setting that a group needs to be 60 to 80 percent women before women start occupying just as much time in the conversation as men. In spite of all this, men continue to perceive that women take up more space in group discussions.
Australian feminist Dale Spender theorizes that this happens because men aren't comparing how frequently women speak to how frequently men speak; they're comparing how much women speak to how much they think women should speak.
Spender says that how much men think women should speak is not at all.