Stereotype Threat, Revisited
The second research finding described in Why So Few? Women in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics is about stereotype threat. This topic was one of the first covered by Laura Hoopes in this forum in March of last year, and I’d like to talk a bit more about it.
In the mid-1990s, social psychologist Joshua Aronson and his colleagues Claude Steele and Steven Spencer first identified and described the phenomenon of stereotype threat, which is the threat of being viewed through the lens of a negative stereotype or the fear of doing something that would confirm that stereotype.
Stereotype threat can be felt by an individual both psychologically and physiologically and results in impaired performance. For example, J. Blascovich et al. (2001) found that African Americans taking an intelligence test under stereotype threat had higher blood pressure levels than white test-takers did. No difference in blood pressure levels of African Americans and whites occurred in the nonthreat situation. Steele and Aronson (1995) found that stereotyped individuals often reread items more often than nonthreatened participants did and worked slower with less accuracy.
In one of the earliest experiments looking specifically at women, Spencer et al. (1999) recruited 30 female and 24 male first-year University of Michigan psychology students with strong math backgrounds and similar math abilities. The students were divided into two groups, and the researchers administered a test using items from the math section of the GRE. One group was told that men performed better than women on the test (the threat condition), and the other group was told that there were no gender differences in test performance (the nonthreat condition). The researchers found that women performed significantly worse than men in the threat situation and that the gender difference almost disappeared in the nonthreat condition.
Aronson and his colleagues conducted another experiment at a large public university in the southwest to investigate stereotype threat among students in a high-level calculus course that is a pipeline to future careers in science. The results showed no difference in performance between female and male STEM majors when they were told that a difficult math test was a diagnosis of their ability (threat condition); however, when the threat was removed by telling the students that women and men performed equally well on the test, the women performed significantly better than the men.
Have you observed the effects of stereotype threat in your teaching or in your own life? If so, I'd love to hear about your experiences.
To GEMSchick:
I can so relate! Not only did I have similar experiences with professors, but fellow (male) students often implied that I got the grades I did solely because I was female, implying I got special treatment!
Also, your comment about 'tolerate but not accept'. Don't know what you are doing now, but I still run into that mentality among many in industry, and I certainly ran into it when I was a student! -- "It's nice to have you in my class - you decorate it well, but sit in the back, be quiet, and don't disturb the rest of us who are supposed to be here..." was the unstated message I often received.
Question to Christianne -- are you sure things have really changed that much? I think it depends on the field and where you are.
Interesting responses. It's hard to imagine a professor acting today like GEMSchick's professor did 34 years ago. Stories like this help me realize how things really have changed for women in STEM subjects, even if the change seems to be slow at times.
I agree with the above post, the stress situation is a challenge for me.
When I was a freshman in college back in 1977, I showed up for my first Numerical Analysis class. The professor, standing in front of a room full of male students, took one look at me and informed me I was in the wrong room. I took out my schedule and showed him that I indeed was signed up for his class. He asked me what my major was. I replied, math. He laughed and asked, "what are you going to do, teach?" Then he said, "well if you insist, have a seat, but this class is not for you". I was furious, and made up my mind that I was going to have the top grade in that class, and I did. Throughout the class, the professor tolerated me, but never accepted me.
At the end of the semester I went home on break and visited my favorite high school Calculus teacher, Mr. Van Allen. I told him this story, and he made an interesting observation. He asked... "do you think you would have done as well in the class if the professor had not said what he said?"
For a few of us strange beasts, the "stress situation" acts as a challenge, and we might even do better! I'd be curious if others felt that way.
I have spent much of my life "acting male"; it was essential to my survival. Therefore, I would tend to ignore the instructions.
