The reasons behind the underrepresentation of women in the physical sciences are varied and complex. Efforts to increase female participation in the sciences have been aimed at students from school to university, with varying degrees of success. At the younger levels, programmes try to engage girls in science subjects and to encourage them to pursue science and maths throughout their schooling. At university, peer mentoring and small group tutorials have been introduced to help female students succeed in science and maths disciplines.

But despite such measures, female students in introductory-level physics at the University of Colorado at Boulder were earning lower median scores than their male classmates. Differences between male and female students in their science education before university could explain some, but not all, of the achievement gap. Akira Miyake and colleagues found that the women students' performance could be improved significantly through a simple psychological exercise of personal reflection (Science 330, 1234–1237; 2010).

All students in the physics class were given two writing assignments in the early weeks of the course. One group was asked to select their most important values from a list, and write about why these values were important to them. Meanwhile, a control group was given an assignment to pick out their least important value, and why it might be important to others. Thus only the students in the first group were forced to reflect their own personal views.

Interestingly, the female students who wrote about what mattered to them scored higher on physics tests in the following weeks than the women in the control group. The effect was greatest among those female students who strongly or moderately identified with the stereotype that men performed better in physics than women. The exercise had little effect on women who did not endorse the gender stereotype, or on men on the course. Even though the assignments were given and completed the beginning of the term, the effects were still evident in the final test marks.

That such a simple self-reflection task can help women overcome their inhibitions in performing to their full potential in a male-dominated subject may be cause for some reflection in education authorities worldwide.