Just because our world doesn't treat women better, it doesn't necessarily mean that it doesn't feel good about them. In an illuminating study published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, researchers uncovered a consistently favorable bias among participants — toward females.
As study author Paul Connor, now a postdoctoral scholar with the Adversarial Collaboration Project at the University of Pennsylvania tells Salon, "We found that the strongest driver of positive versus negative evaluations was the target's gender — people were much more positive towards the female targets than the male targets. The effect of gender was much stronger than the other variables, stronger than social class, race and age."
