アメリカはキャリアウーマンがお嫌い？・・・次期大統領候補ヒラリークリントン
今回は、New York Timesからの次期大統領選に関するトピックだ。
[ ヒラリーはフライト・アテンダントのフリをしなくちゃいけない?? Should Hillary Pretend to Be a Flight Attendant?]
コロンビア大経済学教授が、2人の心理学者と1人の経済学者と共同で、デートに関するリサーチを2年間行った。それは、コロンビア大のキャンパス近くの地元のバーで、スピード・デートする実験だが、その結果は、驚いたことに現代の21世紀でさえ、多くのアメリカ人が「女性はかく有るべし」のステレオタイプな考え方にまだ拘束されている、というものだった。
その研究結果は、ミランダがスピード・デートをする「‘Sex and the City’ 」のテレビドラマの内容に似ている。ミランダが弁護士であると言うと男達は興味を失い、彼女がフライト・アテンダントであると言うと男達は興味津々となる。女性が有能で交際相手より収入が多いとき、相手に知られると反感を買う。だから、収入を隠すか、そんな問題が起きないように、かなり年上の男性と付き合う傾向がある－というのだ。
「男の人に自分より頭が良いと思わせちゃダメよ」というおばあちゃん世代の助言がまだ通用するのだ。
現在、オバマ候補とヒラリー候補が、次期大統領選でデッドヒートを繰り広げている。オバマ候補が強めの文言をスローガンで使っている一方で、前大統領婦人であり弁護士としてのキャリアがあるヒラリーが、紋切り型的に、「台所仕事は好きよ：I likes the kitchen」と加えているのが対照的である。
（以下は原文のまま）
[Should Hillary Pretend to Be a Flight Attendant?]
In 2005, a year after Ellie Grossman,
a doctor, met Ray Fisman, a professor, on a blind date, she was talking
to her grandmother about her guy.
“Never let a man think you’re smarter,” her grandmother advised. “Men don’t like that.”
Ray and Ellie “had a good laugh, thinking times had changed,” he recalled. The pair went on to marry — after she proposed. But now, he says, “it seems like the students at Columbia University should pay heed to Grandma Lil’s advice.”
Mr. Fisman is a 36-year-old Columbia economics professor who conducted a two-year study, published last year, on dating. With two psychologists and another economist, he ran a speed-dating experiment at a local bar near the Columbia campus. The results surprised him and made him a little sad because he found that even in the 21st century, many men are still straitjacketed in stereotypes.
“I guess I had hoped that they had evolved beyond this,” he said in a phone interview. “It’s like that ‘Sex and the City’ episode where Miranda went speed-dating. When she says she’s a lawyer, guys lose interest. Then she tells them she’s a flight attendant and that plays into their deepest fantasies.”
As he recapped the experiment in Slate last week: “We found that men did put significantly more weight on their assessment of a partner’s beauty, when choosing, than women did. We also found that women got more dates when they won high marks for looks.”
He continued: “By contrast, intelligence ratings were more than twice as important in predicting women’s choices as men’s. It isn’t exactly that smarts were a complete turnoff for men: They preferred women whom they rated as smarter — but only up to a point ... It turns out that men avoided women whom they perceived to be smarter than themselves. The same held true for measures of career ambition — a woman could be ambitious, just not more ambitious than the man considering her for a date.
“When women were the ones choosing, the more intelligence and ambition the men had, the better. So, yes, the stereotypes appear to be true: We males are a gender of fragile egos in search of a pretty face and are threatened by brains or success that exceeds our own.”
Hillary Clinton, who is trying to crash through the Oval glass ceiling, may hope that we’re evolving into a kingdom of queen bees and their male slaves. But stories have been popping up that suggest that evolution is moving forward in a circuitous route, with lots of speed bumps.
Perhaps smart women can take hope — as long as they’re built like Marilyn Monroe. Scientists at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and the University of Pittsburgh have released a zany study on the zaftig, positing that men are drawn to hourglass figures not only because they look alluring, but because hips plumped up by omega-3 fatty acids could mean smarter women bearing smarter kids.
Yet Alex Williams recently reported in The Times that the new income superiority of many young women in big cities is causing them to encounter “forms of hostility they weren’t prepared to meet,” leaving them “trying to figure out how to balance pride in their accomplishments against their perceived need to bolster the egos of the men they date.”
Professional women in their 20s are growing deft at subterfuges to protect the egos of dates who make less money, the story said, such as not leaving their shopping bags around and not mentioning their business achievements. Or they simply date older men who might not be as threatened.
Even though men and women in surveys often say that a salary gender gap doesn’t matter, in the real world it can play out differently — either because the man has subterranean resentment he can’t shed, or the woman equates it with a lack of male drive.
Evolution is lurching ahead unevenly at the office, as well. The Times’s Lisa Belkin wrote this month about the confusing array of signals for executive women that can leave them hamstrung.
Catalyst, an organization that studies women in the workplace, found that women who behave in ways that cleave to gender stereotypes — focusing on collegiality and relationships — are seen as less competent. But if they act too macho, they are seen as “too tough” and “unfeminine.”
Ms. Belkin said that another study shows that men — and female secretaries — are not considered less competent if they dress sexy at work, but female executives are.
Women still tend to be timid about negotiating salaries and raises. Men ask for more money at eight times the rate of women.
Victoria Brescoll, a Yale researcher, found that men who get angry at the office gain stature and clout, even as women who get angry lose stature because they are seen as out of control.
That may be why Obama is trying to get “fired up,” in the words of his fall slogan, while Hillary calmly observes that she can take the heat and stereotypically adds that she likes the kitchen.
