Extract from Why Men Win At Work by Gill Whitty-Collins

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