Sinclair manipulated one group of women into thinking that they were about to spend some time with a charmingly sexist man. (Not a woman-hater, but the kind of man who thinks that women deserve to be cherished and protected by men, while being rather less enthusiastic about them being too confident and assertive.) Obligingly, the women socially tuned their view of themselves to better match these traditional opinions. They regarded themselves as more stereotypically feminine, compared with another group of women who were expecting instead to interact with a man with a more modern view of their
...more
The last two sentences are the real stinger here: you don't tune yourself socially to match people you don't give a shit about, but you *will* do it if you need something (e.g. a job, a reference) or you respect them. It is sadly quite different to deal with the former, especially if you want to enter an exploitative/competitive field, but you can at least deal with the latter by making new friends.
