When money has a male face

When Winston Churchill was accused of being drunk by Bessie Braddock he is alleged to have replied,  “And you, Bessie, are ugly. But I shall be sober in the morning, and you will still be ugly”.

What a charmer. I bet Bessie wasn’t one of Winston’s greatest fans. Nor, were she still alive, would be Elizabeth Fry. For as the only female historical figure to feature on an English banknote, she has just been bumped off the £5 note by the former PM.

Quick quiz then. Do you know which leading figures feature on the following English bank notes?

1. The £10 note

2. The £20 note

3. The £50 note (old style)

4. The £50 note (new style)

Scroll down for the answers*.

Currently the £5 pound note depicts Elizabeth Fry reading to prisoners in Newgate Prison. From 2016 she will be replaced by Winston Churchill, giving every note a male face.

Feminist campaigner Caroline Criado-Perez has attacked the Bank of England for failing to eliminate gender discrimination under the Equalities act. Her solicitors have written to the Bank threatening court action and they have two weeks in which to respond. It’ll be interesting to see how they wiggle out of this.

Is this further confirmation that the money world is dominated by men? 

Which female figure would you like to see on an English bank note? I'm sure Maggie Thatcher might prove a popular though controversial figure, and I think Blue Peter presenter Valerie Singleton is a strong contender. 

*

The £10 note shows Charles Darwin, a hummingbird and HMS Beagle

The £20 note has Adam Smith, with an illustration of 'The division of labour in pin manufacturing'

The old style £50 notes feature Sir John Houblon and his house in Threadneedle Street. The new style £50 notes show Matthew Boulton and James Watt, with steam engine and Boulton's Soho.

Oh it's a hot water bottle cover and other tell-tale signs of failed gifts.

Yes, Christmas has been sprung on us again this year (how did that happen?) and the potential for danger once again is huge. 
And I don't mean danger from fizzling fairy lights that the cat peed on, or from undercooked turkey or oversozzled relatives. 
No, I mean the danger of the disastrous gift. 

A large proportion of presents, probably at least a third, are destined to bring out the liar in us all. The biggest lie spoken over the festive period being, "It's just what I always wanted."
My previous research has found a number of facts about failed festive gifts, i.e.:

• 89% of women will pretend to like a gift they hate, 79% of men will.
• Half of all people get at least one present they dislike.
• Half will lie to a loved one about a gift, pretending to like it.
• 1 in 4 people say giving a gift makes them feel anxious.
• 1 in 5 people say receiving a gift makes them feel anxious.
• Men find the whole gift giving and getting thing maore anxiety inducing than women.

But of course we're all very good at hiding our true feelings about those bungled pressies aren't we? Not so. My research also showed that our true feelings leak out in our non-verbal behaviour, even when we're professing to love something. Notably:

• We make eye contact with the giver if we like the gift. If we don't like it we avoid eye contact.
• We produce a fake smile using only the mouth (not the eye) muscles when pretending to like a gift.
• We display a gift we like and show it off to others, but are more likely to rewrap or cover a disliked gift.

It's also been found that when we don't like a gift (and therefore don't know what to say about it) we're likely to simply announce what the gift is. 

As in, "Oh, it's a HOT-WATER BOTTLE COVER." 

Said aloud, with rising intonation, it's a sure give away you're really thinking "What the hell...."

So how can we avoid making the recipients of our offerings squirm on Christmas Day? 

A number of ‘rules’ about gift exchange emerged from my research. They are

• ·      Appropriateness

A gift that’s right will be of an appropriate value and level of intimacy. It shouldn’t violate relationship boundaries by being too intimate or too extravagant for the current status of the relationship.

• ·      Empathy

A positive gift will be imbued with shared meaning, show understanding of need and signal a connection in the relationship. Failed gifts are often empty of meaning and/or show lack of understanding.

• ·      Effort

A successful gift will have required the giver to put in some effort into choosing the desired object. Gifts low on substance and sentiment send out the wrong message.

I hope all your gifts are well-received this Christmas and that all that come your way are just what you always wanted. If they're not, well, you could always open them in the dark in silence then no-one will ever know....

Do women dress for men - or women?

So, apparently, women spend almost £84,000 on clothes in their lifetime. 
And they are dressing more seductively in the economic downturn to increase their chances of nabbing that rare thing, a man with a decent job.

Or that’s the spin that the Daily Mail put on a recent study to come out of Texas Christian University.

As if it was really that simple, that women just dress to impress men.

In an earlier blog I did point out that high heels force women to adopt a posture reminiscent of randy babboons and, sure, that’s all about appearing seductive. 
But women who expose too much flesh can actually be harming their career prospects.
I still find the enclothed cognition argument compelling, i.e. that women dress to impress themselves, since certain clothes make them feel better, give them confidence and lift their mood (even if there’s not a man in sight).

Clearly it’s complicated. There seem to be three factors at work:

1.    Evolutionary psychologists have shown us that clothing sends out all kinds of sexual signals (red for fertility, high heels for fecundity). This is the ‘women dress to attract men’ argument.

2.    Then there’s the function of clothes for emotional regulation, which is born out by my research showing that women select clothes accord to their moods. This could be seen as the ‘women dress for themselves’ argument.

3.    There’s a third factor too. It’s the ‘women dress for other women’ point of view.  Take a look at this:

Letter from a popular Sunday newspaper supplement.

£600 for a scarf? What credit crunch? 
That aside, could it be that women dress to get one over on the competition as this letter suggests? 

Blogger Nikolas Lloyd thinks yes (and has kindly allowed me to quote his theory here):

Imagine a society in which there are not very many women around who are available. Such a society was the one in which we evolved. In the world of the forager, a potential mate came along seldom, and one usually only had a small selection of women from which to choose a life partner. In this society, a woman who had known the local men for ages and was on good terms with them, was very nice, but perhaps not the best looking or a little bit past her prime, might lose out to some slip of a thing who walked out of the forest. A foreign woman might out-compete all the local women, even if she hardly spoke the language, if she was young and pretty, and this would not please the local women. What could these women do to keep the stranger out? Well, just as language seems to have evolved partly to keep out outsiders (a human who has learned a language as an adult will almost never fully master it and pass as a local), so too could fashion. The local women could make it next to impossible for the foreigner to pass as a local, and become accepted in society, by coming up with many arbitrary and subtle rules of fashion.

So Lloyd thinks women dress in a way that helps them fit in with their social group and keep out intruders. Identification with one's social group is clearly one purpose of fashion. And one way we signal our affiliation with a social group is through clothing: this is true whether your group is a Mayan tribe, or mums at the school gate. 
He's got a point. 
It's quite likely that those other women are far more likely to notice what you're wearing than any passing male.

How to dress for success

Watch a video here about first impressions and how to dress for success.....



it's great to see our University of Hertfordshire research featured in this video, which reinforces the message conveyed in an earlier post that dress disasters can ruin your job prospects ... without you even knowing it.

Baboons in stilettos

A friend recently confessed that she wears high heels all the time because her husband ‘prefers them’. (So if you thought he looked sexier in a horse-hair cod piece, he’d wear one for you would he?) ….

Her hubbie obviously hasn't descended down the same line as Matt Rudd who, in today’s Sunday Times, is bewildered that women wear things that cripple them with blisters and prevent them from running. When it comes to heels there are clearly two types of males, those affected by lordosis and those who aren’t.

Lordosis, I hear you cry, what the Jimmy Choo is that?

It’s an abnormal forward curvature of the spine. The position that a high heel forces the female form into, with the back arched and the buttocks invitingly tipped up. According to the American Physical Therapy Association, “Walking in high heels forces the back to arch and the chest to thrust forward. Basically, high heels cause the neck and back to hyperextend.”

If you’re thinking this is a load of babboon’s buttocks you’re right, it’s the courting pose of mammals. 

Helen, Fisher, author of the Biology of Attraction, says:

"Some women also have a characteristic walk when courting; they arch their backs, thrust out their bosoms, sway their hips, and strut. No wonder many women wear high-heeled shoes. This bizarre Western custom, invented by Catherine de Medici in the 1500s, unnaturally arches the back, tilts the buttocks, and thrusts the chest out into a female come-hither pose. The clomping noise of their spiky heels draws attention too."

Despite a recent finding that high heels denote emotional instability during cognitive appraisal, it seems that evolutionary psychology is alive and well and tripping down the catwalk. Or the high street.

Made it to the top - but the view's not what we expected...

I know I've banged on quite a bit about women on boards, but here's a health warning. 

It seems that when women do get to the top many are faced with a glass cliff and left dangling over a dangerous company precipice.

Women are more likely to be appointed to leadership positions
when an organisation is in crisis.

By 2015 Lord Davies wants 25% female representation on boards (yes, one in four – an odd way of construing equality I know). And this year’s figures suggest everything’s on target to achieve it. In the FTSE100 women now account for 15.6% of all directorships, up from 12.5% last year. And although there are still 11 all-male boards, at least that’s down from last year’s staggering 21.

But last week, when talking to Ernst and Young about diversity, a lovely lady there alerted me to the notion of the glass cliff. 

Yes, we’ve heard of the glass ceiling – that invisible put impenetrable barrier that hinders female advancement in the workplace -  and even the glass escalator that gives men a smooth ride to the top, but the glass cliff? 

It comes from research by Ryan and Haslam at the University of Exeter who, in a systematic study of the performance of FTSE 100 companies before and after appointing a board member, found that companies who appointed a woman were more likely to have experienced consistently poor performance in the months preceding the appointment.

This is both good and bad news. It demonstrates that companies are willing to do something different in times of crisis. In fact there's more recent evidence that  a crisis disrupts traditional stereotypes of what makes a good leader, favouring female attributes over male. But it's a bit like taking over the controls after the car has been wrecked and Ryan and Haslam  include a note of caution in their paper, saying:

Positions on glass cliffs can be seen as being exceedingly dangerous for the women who hold them. Companies that have experienced consistently bad performance are bound to attract attention to themselves and to those on their boards of directors … In this way, compared to men, women who assume leadership offices may be differentially exposed to criticism and in greater danger of being apportioned blame for negative outcomes that were set in train well before they assumed their new roles.

Ryan & Haslam (2005),The Glass Cliff: Evidence that Women Are Over-Represented in Precarious Leadership Positions, British Journal of Management.