Vintage whine badly corked

Congratulations are in order for Jane Caro (above), who is no doubt pleased as Punch to have been honoured with a Midyear Walkley Award for her leadership of women. Yes, you might not have noticed, but there is now so much sterling journalism in Australia that one batch of honours every twelve months is no longer enough to hail all that inky excellence.

Ms Caro, an ABC fixture and lit-fest gabbler, specialises in confirming feminine preconceptions of universal victimhood. You know how it goes: Julia Gillard is no longer PM because she is a woman, not because of general incompetence, lies, shady associates and the unintended consequence of arming ruthless ambition with a knife in each hand. Same with Hillary Clinton, whose failure to campaign in vital states and habit of insulting those Deplorables whose votes she needed (and didn’t get) had nothing to do with her defeat. No, girls can never get a fair shake, apparently because nasty men insist on pointing out that some women are just as crooked, venal and devious as their XY counterparts.

This perspective is interesting because one of the pieces for which Ms Caro was honoured, an essay in the Saturday Paper, contains these paragraphs (emphasis added):

The famous Heidi/Howard experiment revealed our unacknowledged bias against women of achievement and ability. The experiment gave male and female students identical case studies to assess. They were asked to rate them on skills and likeability. The only difference was some of the case studies bore the name Howard and some Heidi. Both Howard and Heidi were ranked identically for skills – as they should be, given they are identical.

However, the higher the reviewers – both male and female – marked Howard for skills, the higher they marked him for likeability. When it came to Heidi, the higher they marked her for skills, the lower they marked her for likeability. In other words, the more accomplished a woman becomes and the higher she rises in the world, the more likely we are to think she is a bitch. No wonder so many voters explain their lack of support for Clinton by saying they find her “unlikeable”.

True, this appeared in a newspaper chiefly memorable for its young editor’s comb-free tonsuring and immense regard for his own prose, but it might strike some that an article cited for its excellence wouldn’t be using out-of-date information, let alone neglecting to mention that Ms Caro’s example of institutionalised misogyny had been refuted. The Atlantic reports:

In a recent segment for his show, CNN’s Anderson Cooper had New York University’s business school repeat the Heidi/Howard study, now ten years after it was originally conducted. This time around, students rated the female entrepreneur as more likable and desirable as a boss than the male.

That NYU testing of the Heidi/Howard hypothesis took place in 2013, so the survey Ms Caro references and for which she has been honoured is getting rather long in the tooth. Apparently, when the Walkley crew honour news coverage what they actually mean is “olds” coverage.

Failing to keep up with the news while flinging misandrist darts from a comfy nest of unquestioned presumptions  also  stiffed readers of a fascinating further update conducted and compiled by Southern University of New Hampshire researcher Melanie Friese some five years ago. Ms Friese took the original Heidi/Howard premise and expanded it with a lavish biographical sketch of each fictional subject, the only difference being that the confected and otherwise identical CVs dubbed the male “Andrew” and the female “Amber”.

Surprise! Surprise! It turns out, as Ms Friese put it (emphasis added),

The female participants seemed to have a resistance to Amber’s character; whereas, the males were more concerned with participating in the project with Andrew.

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