The way she looks

Recently I asked my Dad who belongs to a predominantly macho generation if he ever felt disappointed that his firstborn was a girl. He answered me like a good loving father would — that when I came out, he did not care whether I was a boy or a girl but that I was part of him. Well, I asked him because now that I am a lot older, I have had enough first-hand experiences to know that simply being female skewed people’s judgment, for better or worse, of my performance whether at school, work or play. In particular, I have had a suspicion that women seem to be so judged much more on the way they look, regardless of whether how they look is relevant to their work. Noola Griffiths of the University of Sheffield must have suspected that this holds true when we watch women musicians so she did an experiment.

Published last April in the journal Psychology of Music, Griffith’s study had 30 observers (15 male and 15 female) watch four female violinists and rate each in terms of their technical proficiency, musicality, appropriateness of dress and attractiveness of performer. Each musician played twice, one her own interpretation and the other, the most essential that the observers did not know about — one with a master track dubbed over the performance. The master track was common for all the four musicians so that the study could detect the difference in the rating despite exactly the same performance. The variable was how the musicians dressed: jeans, concert dress and night-clubbing dress. They were also observed behind a screen where the kind of dress that the musician wore could not be detected.

The design of the study was quite meticulous. In order to rule out the possibility that a female musician was significantly more attractive than another, all the musicians, aged between 20 and 22, even had to rate as “equals” in a geometric face test (probably akin to the Fibonacci configured “golden mask” that cosmetic surgeons use on their patients). I do not know if we could really reduce attractiveness to pure geometry but it is important that we know that study even took pains to do this. The observers were all music students and members of the Sheffield Philharmonic.

The most striking revelation of the study is that that the musician observers seem to have a very solid concept of what is an appropriate dress for the genre of music played. The nightclub dress fared the worst of all despite the fact that it was the same music being played. Also, the more the dress attracted attention to the musician’s body, the worse the perception of the musical performance.

Now, we are all probably nursing the same question by now: then why are racy music videos so popular? I do not think it would shatter anyone’s worldview to know that the general music video audience does not consist of members of the philharmonic. We all come from different backgrounds, carry different hang-ups, different repressions. A music video is not really mostly about the music but how it is visually interpreted. A trained musician would focus on the music while the rest of us may be lost in the other seductive blackholes of the video.

I read some articles on this same study and in many music auditions in the US, women musicians were more likely to be hired when they auditioned behind a screen when it could not easily be detected that they were women. While this study was only in music, it is tempting to see in a study, where else this gender bias lurks. So this may be a good chance for women to wonder whether they got or did not get what they applied for because of how they looked and for others to see whether they really considered only the relevant traits of an applicant and not simply the way she dressed.

Growing up, I have always been influenced by my Dad in the way he dressed and perceived things. I think this is why I generally like blue things and clean cuts. When I ask him now how come he never raised me like a “traditional Filipina,” he says he really had no choice as he was just reacting to who I was — a lunatic and he thought it was too much trouble to resist who I was becoming. My Dad has lived through (and still lives through) all the “untraditional” and “un-Filipina” things I have done (and doing) — but he never did tell me that he wished I were more “normal.” I do not know how my appearance affects how others perceive my work. For writers, we naturally work behind a veil and hopefully, what comes out would have nothing to do with what I wear (or not wear) when I am writing.

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