While many of us believe in making equality happen, there is a lot of cultural baggage to get through when it comes to changing deeper prejudices.

Scientists in America have found that men are more likely to be seen as ‘brilliant’ than women which has been linked to implicit bias due to stereotypes. The research was published in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology which was conducted by scientists from New York University, the University of Denver and Harvard University, and was the result of a test geared to measure stereotypes indirectly. Subjects used the Implicit Association Test (IAT), which works like a sorting test measuring the overlap between concepts (‘male’ and ‘brilliant’ in this case). Participants would be shown images – like a woman and the word ‘brilliant’ and asked to sort them into group. The logic is that if brilliant is more associated with male than female in people’s minds, participants would be faster to sort the stimuli when brilliant and male images would be seen as the stereotype which makes those concepts go together.

The research tested men and women, and boys and girls aged 9 and 10, from 78 countries across 5 studies, and found consistent evidence for the stereotype that men are more brilliant than women. This has been put down to male stereotypes being more associated with work and careers. In the same study they also quizzed participants explicitly though men were more brilliant, but when asked in this way that was not the case. Tess Charlesworth from Harvard University, a co-author of the study said, “If anything, people explicitly say that they associate women with brilliance. Yet implicit measures reveal a different story about the more automatic gender stereotypes that come to mind when thinking about brilliance.”

To address such ingrained stereotypes about male brilliance, The Book of Man would suggest people take a look at the ‘counter-protestors’ making a stand against Black Lives Matter. It may will replace the ‘men are more brilliant’ stereotype with ‘men are barely sentient’.