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Colloquy: Join a live, online discussion with David C. Geary, a professor of psychology at the University of Missouri at Columbia, about research suggesting that there are innate differences between the sexes that explain the predominance of men in mathematics, on Wednesday, March 2, at 2 p.m., U.S. Eastern time.
While it is well known that stereotypes can harm people, psychologists in the past decade have found some insidious effects that may account for a sizable fraction of the gender gap in science and mathematics.
Claude M. Steele, a professor of psychology at Stanford University, and his colleagues identified that hidden effect, which they call stereotype threat, in 1999. It happens when people enter a situation in which they might be subjected to a detrimental stereotype. For example, girls taking a math test might score lower than equally intelligent boys. But an experimenter can eliminate that difference if the girls are told ahead of time that results on that particular test have shown no gender gap.
In another situation, psychologists can make white males perform worse on a math test simply by telling them that Asians have scored better on the same test.
What happens, says Mr. Steele, is that the brain unconsciously goes into overdrive. People try to do their work at the same time that they start considering the cost of failure and whether any shortcomings on their part will be seen as confirming the stereotype. Their blood pressure goes up and they start to sweat, usually without realizing it.
Paradoxically, stereotype threat harms people most when they excel in a given subject. For instance, young women who are in honors math classes are often in the minority and hence more aware of the stereotype that boys are better at math. “It’s one of the important factors that wear women down and get women who are good in these areas to leave,” says Mr. Steele. “Some meaningful part of the gender gap in math tests and math courses at the college level is due to the stereotype threat.”
That makes the comments by Lawrence H. Summers, president of Harvard University, all the more disturbing, says Mr. Steele. “The kind of cultural stereotype pressure fueled by comments like Summers made is so incendiary,” he says. “It has costs. He’s certainly contributing as much to women’s underrepresentation in science and math as anything in their genes is contributing to it.”
http://chronicle.com Section: Research & Publishing Volume 51, Issue 26, Page A13