My favorite cooking show, Tournament of Champions, has just started its seventh season on Food Network. It has accidentally provided one of the most compelling natural experiments demonstrating the existence and potential impact of implicit bias. While cooking has traditionally been viewed as women’s work, being a professional chef has been a male-dominated field. This domination, to a certain extent, was also held for contest winners on television cooking shows. 14 of 20 Top Chef winners, including 8 of the first 9, were men. 8 of the 11 people who have been Iron Chefs have been men. Women have been more equal in representation as time has passed. Still, men tend to win at least as often as women in most highly rated competitions. Except for Tournament of Champions.
Tournament of Champions differs from most competitions in important ways. It is a single-elimination bracket, rather than a lengthy competition. It primarily invites chefs who have won or performed very well on prior televised cooking shows. Most importantly, though, it is an entirely blind evaluation process. The judges don’t know who is in the tournament, and don’t know the identity of the chef who cooked each dish they evaluate, so there’s no chance for bias in the judging. Under these conditions, women have absolutely dominated this competition. Season 7 has just started. Over the first six seasons, all 5 winners have been women (one won it twice). This includes the most recent season, when the previous winners did not participate. Moreover, only two men have been in the top 4 in the history of the show, none did in this past year’s thinned-out field, and no man has reached the finals. Only 3 white men have reached the quarter-finals, and none have reached the semi-finals. Overall, women have won against men in head-to-head match-ups at a 2-1 ratio. When the judging is done entirely blind, women and minorities succeed at a much higher rate than white men do.
The drastic difference blind evaluation makes shows that something causes misjudgment when the decision-makers know who they’re voting for. These results heavily suggest that women have been unfairly judged on a regular basis in cooking competitions. There’s no way 8 out of the first 9 Top Chefs deserved to be men while virtually every great competitor in this blind evaluation show deserved to be women. Since blind evaluation can’t be subject to bias, improper evaluation of food known to have been cooked by a man or a woman must be part of the explanation. This has started to change, and women are winning on shows like Top Chef more often. What’s startling, though, is that the data clearly shows that at the top levels of fame and success, female chefs are vastly superior to their male counterparts. This level of difference in performance calls out for some explanation. I’ll assume for the sake of this discussion that the difference isn’t fully explained by genetics. I don’t really know how to measure that factor, and I’m always open to correction on empirical issues, but it would be surprising if all the features involved in being a great chef were significantly genetically slanted to women. Since the data is contrary to the numbers we get in most competitions, there is good reason to think bias plays a role in other places. When bias is corrected for, though, the expectation is that this will result in basically equal outcomes, not in ones that heavily favor the traditionally misjudged people in the field. The straight-forward cultural explanation doesn’t seem to match the data. Something more complicated must be happening here.
There’s another large social phenomenon that calls out for explanation. Young women are outperforming young men in several ways. Women are entering and are completing college at higher rates than men who begin at the same time. Women now have higher average IQs than men. In several larger cities, young women are getting paid at higher rates than young men, and single women get paid at higher rates in general. Women are also far more likely to have romantic partners, and to have recently had sex. Young men are significantly more likely than young women to live with their parents into their late 20s and early 30s. Girls are outperforming boys in K-12 education by significant and increasing amounts. The performance of boys and girls has not just been corrected, it has shifted significantly towards women. So, why are males failing to compete with women so often? While any complex empirical issue will have an array of influences, I’m inclined to think the answer lies in the messages that each gender has been told throughout their lives, and in the fading assistance from implicit bias men used to enjoy, but increasingly are unable to rely on.
One common theme I’ve heard from women in several professions is that to be respected as much as a man, you have to work twice as hard. Older women almost certainly experienced this. Bias against women in the workplace was undeniably high in the past, and only by standing out in ways that completely negated the possibility of doubting their greatness could women succeed. Older women trained younger ones to expect this, and this message was passed along over generations. It was less true as sexism decreased, but it led to more concerted efforts from women relative to men at developing their skills. Women thought they had to be better than men, so they worked extra hard to become amazing if they wanted to be at the top of their field. This extra effort expected of them to become great appears to have translated to actual greatness in fields like being a chef. Female chefs are better than male chefs because they demanded more of themselves with the expectation that if they didn’t, they would never succeed. It’s also telling that white males did particularly poorly in these competitions. To a certain extent, males of other races were probably told they needed to work harder as well. White males of this age group were taught to expect praise without working as hard, and they lived down to expectations. As a result, on average, they aren’t as good as others of the same generation who were told they needed to be excellent in order to get any recognition. All of this could explain why at the highest levels, women have forced themselves to work harder, and this has paid off for them.
Things are increasingly worse for men at other levels of skill. This suggests influences other than bias leading to a degree of accepted complacency. One of those is likely to be about encouragement. Efforts to encourage girls to succeed have pervaded society for decades now. Any message to girls that they aren’t as good as boys has been heavily attacked. Support for girls to succeed in every field has been intense. All disparities that favored males have been treated as evidence of a large social problem that needs to be fixed. Much of this was necessary to varying degrees to correct for sexism in society. However, it appears to have left boys out in ways that are hurting them. Telling a girl she can do anything sounds great to adults who are familiar with the history of sexist oppression this message fights. Telling only girls that they can do anything around boys who aren’t familiar with that history sounds like a message that boys can’t, and shouldn’t expect to succeed in these fields. The lack of support boys have gotten under the assumption that sexist attitudes will continue to make their lives easy has created younger generations who feel little motivation to become great at things. Now that they have to compete in a more equal society with girls who have been encouraged to thrive their whole lives, they are failing behind them at a startling rate.
The bad news for women is that they are still subject to implicit bias in various contexts. This problem appears to be decreasing, but is still worth looking out for. The good news for women is that the encouragement they have had seems to have worked very well for them. They believe in themselves, and they work harder to succeed because they think they have to. Excellence is an unsurprising side-effect of this combination among the very talented in a field. The good news for men is that they will be given the benefit of the doubt more often than they should, and they can more easily obtain success in certain areas. The bad news for men is that they are far less likely to enter situations where this might even come up. I think the obvious solution here is to continue eliminating the impact of implicit bias while simultaneously broadening the helpful encouragement and motivation to all children. They should be told that they can succeed, but that it will take hard work to do so. Removing gender-specific elements to these messages can only further the larger effort to remove gender-based discrimination from society.
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