Extract from Why Men Win At Work by Gill Whitty-Collins
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why men win at work<br />
Laura Bates puts it in Everyday Sexism:<br />
For a white, middle-aged, middle-class man who sees<br />
his own face staring back out of every page, every<br />
news bulletin, every panel show, it must be difficult to<br />
imagine being one of many regular women looking<br />
through paper after paper, magazine after magazine,<br />
watching film after film and rarely catching a glimpse<br />
of yourself. 33<br />
What is perhaps even more worrying is the ‘invisible knowledge’<br />
that is being developed <strong>by</strong> artificial intelligence based<br />
on newspapers, magazines and literature <strong>from</strong> across time<br />
– the computers that are making decisions for us are being<br />
taught to be biased towards men and against women.<br />
This over-representation of men in the media has a<br />
significant impact on how we perceive women, especially<br />
when combined with the role models we see in ceo and<br />
senior management roles, politics, the justice system or even<br />
in education (only one in five uk professors and only one in<br />
seven of the teaching staff at the University of Cambridge are<br />
women, for example). 34 Only half of Italian women and 40%<br />
of Japanese women believe a woman is an electable leader.<br />
‘Women should concentrate on the household while men<br />
work.’ 35 So we are not only facing a huge gender gap in the<br />
here and now, we are facing a self-fulfilling prophecy that will<br />
never unravel itself unless there is radical change. We need<br />
to break the cycle or we will never see women in the roles<br />
we should see them in, and to do this the representation of<br />
women needs to change – both in the important roles they<br />
play in society and in the images we project of them.<br />
The good news is that this does and will work both ways.<br />
Indira Gandhi became Prime Minister of India in 1966 and<br />
when her term ended in 1977 89% of Indian women believed<br />
a woman was an electable leader. 36 After eight years of Iceland’s<br />
Vigdís Finnbogadóttir’s presidency, children under eight thought<br />
26