The study also found that men and women predicted negative stereotypes would actually cause women to perform better to overcome the stereotype obstacle.
The full study will appear in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology’s May issue, according to the press release.
“This study has major implications for women in technology and business environments, where women’s abilities are regularly impugned by negative stereotypes,” Mary Murphy, assistant professor in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences at IU, said in ?the release.
“These are the places where women are most likely to experience stereotype threat, and if their supervisors and co-workers cannot anticipate how these threats interfere with performance, that’s a serious problem. It’s one of the ways women end up underrepresented in science, technology, engineering and math,” she said in ?the release.
In the release, Boucher referenced the current lawsuit in California brought by Ellen Pao — who claims to have been discriminated against based on gender, which she said prevented her from advancing at the venture capital firm she worked for — as a recent example of a “stereotype threat.”
The goal of the study was to find out how negative stereotypes affected anxiety and performance of women. The study was conducted at IU and included 150 study participants, both male and female, according to the release.
The participants were given a short test, but during the exam a message appeared telling participants the goal of the study was to find out why women are generally worse at math than men, according to the press release.
This message was the negative stereotype introduced to the women.
The results showed that female test-takers did perform worse when introduced to negative stereotypes and reported greater anxiety, according to the press release.
“The study’s implications go beyond the classroom into the many other social environments where negative stereotypes about women play a role,” Boucher said in the release.
“They force us to ask whether people not affected by similar stereotypes can effectively recognize and find ways to reduce their impact,” she said in the press release. “It also puts into perspective the enormous challenge of eliminating the effects of stereotypes despite growing awareness about their harm to women and society.”
Boucher also said the expectations didn’t match reality. Both genders expected the stereotypical threat to experience ?greater anxiety.
They also expected that this anxiety and stereotype would not affect their performance. This showed women didn’t have any special insight into how stereotype threats affect people, according to ?the release.
The study found that females were just as likely to overestimate the performance of other women when facing threats of ?stereotypes.
The participants also reported they thought the stereotype would work as a “motivating challenge,” according to the press ?release.
However, female participants didn’t report a high level of motivation when asked about their performance, according to ?the release.
Boucher said the misconceptions are significant and could cause people to not support programs and policies that would lessen the effects of negative gender stereotypes, according to ?the release.
The disconnect between reality and perception in the negative attitudes shown in this study could also affect support.
“While many factors can impact performance outside a controlled environment — be it the classroom or the boardroom — it’s unlikely that performance evaluators currently consider negative stereotypes about women as a serious cause for impaired performance, and so it is unlikely that they will take steps to reduce them,” Boucher said in the release.
“Thoughtful applications of this study’s findings, however, could help address women’s achievement gaps and increase their representation in fields where they’re most negatively stereotyped. Recognizing the problem is the first step to addressing it,” she said in the ?press release.
Suzanne Grossman
