Today, we live in a world where people of many races, genders, cultures, and backgrounds face typical generalizations made by everyday people called stereotypes.
These stereotypes may also change the way people behave simply because the stereotype has a negative effect on their ability to perform a particular task. When people have fear of conforming to a particular stereotype that results in inadequate performance, they face what is known as stereotype threat. One common stereotype is of women performing worse than men on math tests.Now, is this because they have less capability in math or simply because the stereotype is stressed too much? An article of an experiment done by Steven Spencer, Claude Steele, and Diane Quinn called “Stereotype Threat and Women’s Math Performance” in 1998 answers this question by conducting three related studies to see how stereotype threat effected women’s math performance.
Study one was done to verify the stereotype that states women underperform on difficult math test than men, but perform equally as men on easy math test.The researchers used 28 men and 28 women that had already completed at least one semester of calculus with a grade of a “B” or higher. After obtaining the results, the researchers concluded that this stereotype was true with the participants in the research. Women did perform worse than men on the difficult test but they did just the same as men on the easier math test.
However, the researchers question was what caused women to underperform on difficult test? They believed that women experienced stereotype threat, which affected their ability on score well on difficult test.Therefore, the researchers conducted another study to see how stereotype threat affected women on their test results. The study was similar to study one, containing 30 women and 24 men that were selected with the same criteria at the University of Michigan. This time however, stereotype threat was manipulated by telling half of the participants that the first test showed gender differences and the second test did not.
The results showed that the women in the number of people that were told there were gender differences in the test, underachieved than men.It also showed that the omen in the number of people that were not told of the gender differences in the test, performed just as well as men did on the math test. Women’s math performance reduced due to the impact of the stereotype threat when being told the test showed gender differences in the past. Another study was conducted to provide more accurate results than study 2. In this particular study, study 2 was replicated but “with a less highly selected sample from another university” (Spencer, Steele, Quinn 1999).
The researchers also examined other mediators that affect women’s performance in math.This time 36 women and 31 women were selected from State University of New York at Buffalo to get a grasp a different population. The researchers collected the performance scores on the test, self-efficacy, state anxiety and also evaluation apprehension. The results reflected the same results as study two.
Women’s test scores improved when the stereotype threat had decreased. Self-efficacy and evaluation apprehension do not appear to be mediators in the effects of women’s math performance. However, the researchers concluded that anxiety could be a possible mediator in addition to stereotype threat in which women underperform on math tests.In conclusion, the researchers found that stereotype threat did affect women’s math performance.
This may lead to women “disidentifying” themselves with math and math related fields such as engineering. The study also concluded that when stereotype threat decreased, women’s math performance increased, verifying that biological differences do not impact women’s math performance. Over all, stereotype threat does have negative effects on people and this can lead to great disability in a field such as math.
