2. Never do a maths test in your swimming costume

Put a group of women and men in a room. Split them up. Give half of them swimming costumes to change into and half of them jumpers to put on over their clothes. Send them into changing rooms, tell them to look themselves up and down in a full-length mirror and then ask them how they feel about their body in a questionnaire. Then get them to sit down and do a maths test. The women in the swimming costumes, now that they’ve been made aware of their own bodies and perhaps feel vulnerable in minimal clothing, will do worse on their tests than the women in jumpers. They’ll get an average of 2.5 correct answers, compared to 4 for the jumper-clad ladies. The men’s scores will not be affected at all. This is proof that when women are made aware of their own body identities, say at the beach, they become distracted and revert to the social conditioning that told them to assess their own value based on physical attractiveness rather than intelligence.