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| Three cures for mslexia PAGE1 | PAGE 2 | PAGE 3 2 Confidence Spender believes lack of confidence may be even more of a handicap than lack of time to a woman author. Even if they prefer women’s writing themselves, everything else women read - the reviews, the interviews, the literary shortlists - tells them that men’s writing is the work of true quality. ‘With so few acclaimed woman writers, there’s this feeling of: “What if it’s got to start with me? I’m not clever enough. I’ll never be good enough.”’ But researching British literary history, Spender discovered what amounts to a confidence trick against women writers: that there were no less than 100 good women writers before Jane Austen. But only 25 men. Five of those men have been acclaimed as the Fathers of the Novel. But all of the 100 women - many of whom enjoyed ‘dazzling prestige’ during their careers - have vanished almost without trace.17 She’s not suggesting malice aforethought on the part of the male publishers: more a subconscious closing of the ranks (which she believes still takes place in many publishing houses today). So that when choices had to be made about which books to reprint, the women’s were quietly dropped off the lists. What dropped away with them is a sense of literary continuity. As poet Adrienne Rich put it in Lies, Secrets and Silence: ‘women’s work and thinking has been made to seem sporadic, erratic, orphaned of any tradition of its own’.18 But lack of literary tradition is not the only thing undermining women’s confidence as authors. Evidence spanning more than two decades reveals a deeper kind of rot that sets in far earlier, while they are children. Two years ago psychologists Frank Pajares and Margaret Johnson discovered that schoolgirls consistently underestimate the quality of their own writing; boys had a much more realistic assessment.19 Earlier research asking children to guess their ranking in class, found that even when they were doing better than the boys, girls expected to do worse.20 Spender confirmed these results with her own experiments in three different countries, and tried to disentangle the roots of the girls’ lack of confidence. It stemmed, she concluded, from two different sets of standards being applied to girls’ and boys’ achievements. When a boy does badly, she discovered (at writing, or anything else for that matter), it is frequently attributed to his lack of application or maturity, with comments like ‘he doesn’t concentrate’, or ‘he needs to settle down’. When a girl does badly, she’s more likely to be thought less intelligent. Conversely, if a boy does well, he’s described as ‘clever’ or ‘gifted’. If a girl does well, her achievement is often attributed to ‘mere’ hard work and maturity.21 This double standard, she concludes, ‘promotes self-confidence and high self-esteem among the boys’ - and undermines it in the girls. As Michele Stanforth discovered in her research: boys tend to attribute a poor performance to bad luck or laziness - so success simply confirms their blithe belief in their ability. But girls attribute failure to a lack of ability, which causes them to withdraw rather than work harder.22 It makes sense. If failure makes you feel inadequate - as opposed to unlucky - you’re going to feel much more wary of exposing yourself to it. That this can have a profound effect on creativity is suggested by a series of quite dramatic experiments conducted recently by psychologist John Baer. He found that when girls thought their poems and stories were going to be evaluated by experts, it ‘markedly’ undermined their creativity compared with when they were writing without the prospect of criticism. For boys knowing their work would be judged by experts made no difference to their performance.23 More recent research found a similar effect in adults: the quality of women’s writing deteriorated when they thought their work would be seen by an audience of readers; whereas men’s writing improved significantly.24 These findings make sense of the results of Mslexia’s own specially-commissioned surveys of fiction and poetry publishers and authors’ agents, which revealed that women are over 50 per cent less likely than men to submit their work for publication (Table IV). Commenting on an equivalent phenomenon in the world of journalism, Mirror Editor Piers Morgan, complained woman freelancers ‘just don’t push themselves forward’. Though often bombarded by proposals from men, he got ‘maybe four letters a month from women suggesting stories.’25 The only exception we found was for writing competitions, where for some reason women seemed less inhibited: perhaps because competitions seem more of a lottery, and so less personally threatening; perhaps because it’s easier for them to find the time to complete a single poem or short story for a competition.
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