Supplemental Material for Generic References to Gender Predict Essentialism and Stereotyping Even When They Express Counter-Stereotypic Ideas

The election of a major is a crucial decision for adolescents in Latin America. In Perú, around a third of the total students choose to follow a major in a university. In this context, several factors influence the final decision, like family expectations, social and economic status, and student abilities. Also, students have individual attitudes towards specific careers based on the profit and status they believe they can receive from particular careers. However, parents' opinion is also a significant influence for the vocational decision because their approval of the dreamed career may guide an adolescent to study a profession that is not necessarily their real vocation.Moreover, the processes for parental support of the desired career are still under investigation. As well as adolescents, parents' opinions can be influenced by many contextual factors. Gender stereotypes are one of these factors. Previous research has shown that fathers are more influenced by gender stereotypes towards more desirable careers for both men and women. Gender stereotypes may discourage women from pursuing a career in technological professions. According to UNESCO, despite the advances we have made over the last years, women are not involved enough in engineering careers. Engineering careers have an essential role in our society because they use scientific principles to develop and apply technologies that improve our lifestyles. However, these careers are primarily associated with masculine traits, and many parents in Peru have this perception.On the other hand, engineering careers are perceived as profitable careers being in the top 10 careers with the highest income. Also, they are perceived as high-status careers in our society. Given these benefits, some parents may be willing to nudge their children to study an engineering career, not necessarily considering the real vocation they hold. It is also possible that parents influence their children's vocational attitudes of profit and status, believing that there are better careers than others. Given this context, the present research's main aim is to determine the role of gender and attitudes towards the vocation in predicting parental approval of a dreamed career in engineering.A sample of 1159 students (66.09% male) from the fourth and fifth grades from secondary private and public schools was gathered in Arequipa – Peru. A self-administered survey developed by the authors concerning professional preferences and parental resistance was administered. All data were collected under informed consent, and during class time with the presence of a researcher to clarify any doubt. A set of logistic regression models were estimated that show that fathers are 90% less likely to approve a career in engineering for their daughters than for their sons. If adolescents have profit and status-oriented attitudes towards vocation, there is a decrease of 21% in the likelihood of the father's approval. However, for non-engineering careers, there is no prediction of gender and attitudes. On the other hand, mothers' approval is not conditioned by gender or attitudes; there is only an increase in support if the child declares that they want to study an engineering career. The implications for gender stereotypes and attitudes are discussed, and the possible interventions to orientate parents of the importance of the inclusion of women in STEM careers.

Gender segregation of occupations and entire industries is widespread. The segregation could be the result of perceived job-specific productivity differences between men and women. It could also result from the belief that homogeneous teams perform better or from in-group bias of male or female recruiters. We investigate these explanations in two samples: students and personnel managers. The subjects bet on the productivity of teams that are homogeneous with respect to gender at the outset and then either remain homogeneous or become diverse. The teams work on tasks that differ with respect to gender stereotypes. We obtain similar results in both samples. Women are picked more often for the stereotypically female task, and men are picked more often for the stereotypically male task. Subjects believe that gender-diverse teams perform better, especially in the task with complementarities, and they display an own-gender bias. Elicited expectations about the bets of others reveal that subjects expect the gender stereotypes of tasks but underestimate others’ bets on diversity. This paper was accepted by Yan Chen, behavioral economics and decision analysis. Funding: The authors acknowledge financial support from the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft [Excellence Cluster EXC 2035/1 “The Politics of Inequality” (to U. Fischbacher), CRC TRR 190 “Rationality and Competition” (to D. Kübler), and the Excellence Cluster EXC 2055 “Contestations of the Liberal Script” (to D. Kübler)] and from Tamkeen [NYU Abu Dhabi Research Institute Award CG005 (to R. Stüber)]. Supplemental Material: The data files and online appendix are available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2023.4943 .

Supplemental Material for Promoting Children’s Math Motivation by Changing Parents’ Gender Stereotypes and Expectations for Math

Evidence suggests that possessing more qualifications than is necessary for a job (i.e., overqualification) negatively impacts job candidates’ outcomes. However, unfair discounting of women’s qualifications and negative assumptions about women’s career commitment imply that female candidates must be overqualified to achieve the same outcomes as male candidates. Across two studies, experimental and qualitative data provide converging evidence in support of this assertion, showing that gender differences in how overqualification impacts hiring outcomes are due to the type of commitment—firm or career—that is most salient during evaluations. Overqualified men are perceived to be less committed to the prospective firm, and less likely to be hired as a result, than sufficiently qualified men. But overqualified women are perceived to be more committed to their careers than qualified women because overqualification helps overcome negative assumptions that are made about women’s career commitment. Overqualification also does not decrease perceptions of women’s firm commitment like it does for men: supplemental qualitative and experimental evidence reveals that hiring managers rationalize women’s overqualification in a way they cannot for men by relying on gender stereotypes about communality and assumptions about candidates’ experiences with gender discrimination at prior firms. These findings suggest that female candidates must demonstrate their commitment along two dimensions (firm and career), but male candidates need only demonstrate their commitment along one dimension (firm). Taken together, differences in how overqualification impacts male versus female candidates’ outcomes are evidence of gender inequality in hiring processes, operating through gendered assumptions about commitment. Funding: This research was funded by internal faculty research funds provided by Tepper School of Business, Carnegie Mellon University. Supplemental Material: The online appendices are available at https://doi.org/10.1287/orsc.2021.1550 .

Supplemental Material for Comparing Different Facets of the Social Integration of High-Achieving Students in Their Classroom: No Gender Stereotyping, but Some Nonlinear Relationships

Supplemental Material for Who Cares About Caring? Gender Stereotypes About Communal Values Emerge Early and Predict Boys’ Prosocial Preferences

Supplemental Material for Longitudinal Stability and Change Across a Year in Children’s Gender Stereotypes About Four Different STEM Fields

Supplemental Material for Gender Stereotypes Are Racialized: A Cross-Cultural Investigation of Gender Stereotypes About Intellectual Talents

Supplemental Material for The Development of Children’s Gender Stereotypes About STEM and Verbal Abilities: A Preregistered Meta-Analytic Review of 98 Studies

Gender essentialist and stereotypical beliefs emerge early in childhood, even though parents rarely discuss essentialist ideas with young children and often try to communicate egalitarian messages. Here we considered that parents' generic references to gender, which subtly convey that gender reflects a natural kind, could contribute to the transmission of these beliefs even when they express counter-stereotypic ideas. In this preregistered study, we used unmoderated remote research methods to record 192 parent-child dyads (children ages 3-5) talking about gender and assess children's gender essentialism and stereotypes. Parents' generic references to gender predicted children's essentialism and stereotyping, even when this language expressed neutral and counter-stereotypic content. These findings suggest that highlighting specific counter-stereotypical examples (e.g., "That girl is great at soccer!") might be more effective than counter-stereotypical generic sentences (e.g., "Girls are good at soccer too!") at mitigating gender essentialism and stereotyping in childhood. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).

Competence development in digital technologies, analytics, and artificial intelligence is increasingly important to all types of organizations and their workforce. Universities and corporations are investing heavily in developing training programs, at all tenure levels, to meet the new skills needs. However, there is a risk that the new set of lucrative opportunities for employees in these tech-heavy fields will be biased against diverse demographic groups like women. Although much research has examined the experiences of women in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields and occupations, less understood is the extent to which gender stereotypes influence recruiters’ perceptions and evaluations of individuals who are deciding whether to apply to STEM training programs. These behaviors are typically unobserved because they occur prior to the application interface. We address this question by investigating recruiters’ initial outreach decisions to more than 166,000 prospective students who have expressed interest in applying to a midcareer level online tech training program in business analytics. Using data on the recruiters’ communications, our results indicate that recruiters are less likely to initiate contact with female than male prospects and search for additional signals of quality from female prospects before contacting them. We also find evidence that recruiters are more likely to base initial outreach activities on prospect gender when they have higher workloads and limited attention. We conclude with a discussion of the implications of this research for our understanding of how screening and selection decisions prior to the application interface may undermine organizational efforts to achieve gender equality and diversity as well as the potential for demand-side interventions to mitigate these gender disparities. Funding: We gratefully acknowledge Harvard Business School and MIT Sloan School of Management for generously funding this work. Supplemental Material: The online appendix is available at https://doi.org/10.1287/orsc.22.16499 .

Situational judgment tests have gained popularity in educational and psychological measurement and are widely used in personnel assessment. A situational judgment item presents a hypothetical scenario and a list of actions, and the individuals are asked to select their most likely action for that scenario. Because actions have no explicit order, the item generates nominal responses consisting of the actions selected by the individuals. This article shows how to factor-analyze the nominal responses originated from such a test, including the estimation of the number of latent factors and a factor invariance analysis in a multiple group design. The method consists of applying the MNCM, a multidimensional extension of the nominal categories model by Bock. The article includes the results of two studies: (1) a simulation study about Type-I error rate, statistical power, and recovery of the parameters in a multigroup factorial invariance design and (2) a real data example using responses to a situational judgment test measuring gender stereotypes to illustrate the approach. Results suggest the use of the Akaike information criterion, Bayesian information criterion, and corrected Bayesian information criterion indices to guide the selection of the number of factors with nominal responses. All the analyses are conducted using the computer program Mplus. The code is included as Supplemental Material (available online) for the readers so that they can adapt it to their own purposes.

Competence development in digital technologies, analytics, and artificial intelligence is increasingly important to all types of organizations and their workforce. Universities and corporations are investing heavily in developing training programs, at all tenure levels, to meet the new skills needs. However, there is a risk that the new set of lucrative opportunities for employees in these tech-heavy fields will be biased against diverse demographic groups like women. Although much research has examined the experiences of women in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields and occupations, less understood is the extent to which gender stereotypes influence recruiters’ perceptions and evaluations of individuals who are deciding whether to apply to STEM training programs. These behaviors are typically unobserved because they occur prior to the application interface. We address this question by investigating recruiters’ initial outreach decisions to more than 166,000 prospective students who have expressed interest in applying to a midcareer level online tech training program in business analytics. Using data on the recruiters’ communications, our results indicate that recruiters are less likely to initiate contact with female than male prospects and search for additional signals of quality from female prospects before contacting them. We also find evidence that recruiters are more likely to base initial outreach activities on prospect gender when they have higher workloads and limited attention. We conclude with a discussion of the implications of this research for our understanding of how screening and selection decisions prior to the application interface may undermine organizational efforts to achieve gender equality and diversity as well as the potential for demand-side interventions to mitigate these gender disparities. Funding: We gratefully acknowledge Harvard Business School and MIT Sloan School of Management for generously funding this work. Supplemental Material: The online appendix is available at https://doi.org/10.1287/orsc.2022.16499 .

Supplemental Material for Communal Expectations Conflict With Autonomy Motives: The Western Drive for Autonomy Shapes Women’s Negative Responses to Positive Gender Stereotypes

Supplemental Material for She Sees the Trees, He Sees the Forest: Descriptive Gender Stereotypes of Concreteness and Abstractness