Women, math, and stereotype threat

Segment that appeared on WTTW, Channel 11 in Chicago with Professors Sian Beilock and Allen McConnell, discussing their recently published paper on how math stereotypes hurt women's math performance

Category:

News & Politics

Tags:

• Stereotype
• threat
• women
• math
• psychology

[photoallergic]

Yep, and men are told they are worthless losers (commercials, anyone?), aggressive slobs and the inferiour, oppressing gender that would rape any women on this planet if they could. I'm so sick of it. And with all that affirmative action around (at least in Germany - i doubt it's different in the US) one might suspect that women do have a decent self esteem now. Most even think of themselves as superiour to their male peers, disregarding any actual fact.

[nongmin88]

They needed to do a third and fourth set of testers to really determine the validity of their hypothesis. They should have given an additional group a positive comment, and then a fourth group should have been given some other anxiety-inducing suggestion, such as no one can leave to go to the toilet during the test. The subjects would probably have 'ruminated' on ANY suggestion given during the test, and suffered a decline in performance.

The researchers got the result they were looking for.

[bristles1000]

FUCK SAKE PEOPLE! MEN AND WOMEN THINK AND "ARE" DIFFERENT, girls have boobs, guy gotta dick and so on.... WE ARE NOT SNAILS!

[Germtalia]

@army2k08 i heard that

[Lythya]

@waddleman It's interesting because it shows that stereotypes creates stereotypes. If you're constantly told "women behave a certain way" you will start to subconsciously behave that way - if you are a woman, that is. I could easily imagine after being told women are worse at math thinking: "Oh, well, I'm worse than men, anyway, it's going to be bad results in any case." And if you think that way, you WILL get bad results.

[Inkhart]

@nongmin88 I realize that you posted this comment four months ago, but I just wanted to let you know that there have been many studies on this stereotype, and a particular study did have these different manipulations: one group (control) was not told anything, one group was told that women are genetically worse at math, one group was told that women are generally worse at math but this can be improved, and one group was told about the stereotype but reminded that it was false.

[army2k08]

@Tsugua21 Liberals are bad, liberals are evil, liberals are bad, liberals are evil, liberals are bad, liberals are evil...

[Tsugua21]

This video is bullshit, liberals are ruining this country. Liberals need to grow up. Liberals always have the perfect excuse.

[easbmatt]

@waddleman It's about stereotypes in general you fool, which either directly or indirectly apply to all the topics you mentioned.