Alleviating women’s mathematics stereotype threat through salience of group achievements

Abstract

Stereotype threat impairs performance in situations where a stereotype holds that one’s group will perform poorly. Two experiments investigated whether reminding women of other women’s achievements might alleviate women’s mathematics stereotype threat. In Experiment 1, college women performed significantly better on a difficult mathematics test when they were first told that women in general make better participants than men in psychology experiments. In Experiment 2, college women performed significantly better on a difficult mathematics test when they first read about four individual women who had succeeded in architecture, law, medicine, and invention. The results are seen as having implications for theories of stereotype threat, self-evaluation, and performance expectations.