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Gender, math, and stereotypes
August 31, 2006
Women tend to perform poorly on math tests if you suggest to them before asking the questions that they might. That’s the fascinating conclusion of several studies mentioned in the Washington Post about performance anxiety initiated by a phenomenon called "stereotype threat." The phenomenon holds for minorities as well—people prompted to think about negative gender or racial stereotypes tend to conform to them while the stereotypical thoughts are fresh in their minds.
Now, the Post reports, University of Texas psychologist Matthew S. McGlone has conducted a study showing evidence of a countervailing effect, which I might call “stereotype enhancement.” When prompted to think about stereotypical strengths rather than weaknesses, people perform better.
In McGlone’s study, he presented identical math tests to two groups of college students, each containing men and women. (There was a control group as well, but it’s not relevant to the point I want to make here.) But for one group, he prefaced the math test with questions about coed housing and other aspects of campus life that bring gender issues to the forefront. For the other group, he prefaced the math test with questions about how each student had come to be accepted at the elite liberal-arts college they were attending.
The result: women subject to the stereotype-threat questions underperformed men by 25 to 30%. For the other, stereotype-enhancement, group? “There was no significant difference between men and women," McGlone reported.
This result leads to an interesting take on the Lawrence H. Summers controversy. Summers was forced to step down as president of Harvard this summer after suggesting that innate differences between men and women might be one reason fewer women succeed in science and math careers and why there is a dearth of female professors in science and engineering at elite universities. Perhaps his suggestion made him a walking, talking stereotype threat whose comments could contribute to the results he wanted to attribute to innate differences.
September 1 update: See related content from our September issue: "Where are the women?"
Posted by Rick Nelson on August 31, 2006 | Comments (0)
