"Picture Yourself as a Stereotypical Male"

A friend shared the blog post "Picture Yourself as a Stereotypical Male" by Michelle G., an undergraduate student at MIT, and I just finished reading it.  I loved it and I think you should read it too.   

I'm sharing the excerpted part my friend sent to me as a teaser here as well:

"Soon after participants described themselves with either the male- or female-associated traits, they were asked to take a mental rotation test presented as independent of the first part of the study, supposedly to measure their personal spatial aptitude. 

On this mental rotation test, women who were “primed” with the female identity scored an average of 3.86 on the exercise, compared to the female-primed males’ average of 5.14. Okay, expected. But then when primed with the male text, women scored an average of 5.49, while men scored 5.53… wait a second, what?  

As it turns out, there is zero statistically significant gender difference in mental rotation ability after test-takers are asked to imagine themselves as stereotypical men for a few minutes. None. An entire standard deviation of female under-performance is negated on this condition, just as a man’s performance is slightly hindered if he instead imagines himself as a woman. 

Similar findings have been shown regarding racial identities: for example, asking black students to indicate their race before a test both significantly increases their anxiety and lowers their test scores. Black students’ performance under a "diagnostic" condition is improved when the test administrator is black as opposed to white (that 2.9% black MIT faculty tho) and black participants taking what was actually an IQ test scored better when the same questions were presented as a test of “hand-eye coordination.” Unsurprisingly, the same stereotype threat effects that were initially found for black test-takers were also found to apply to Latinos and students of low socioeconomic status."

This piece is so important to keep at the forefront of our minds in our work with students at ScriptEd.  Stereotype threats can negatively impact performance. It's so important that we remind our students that they are smart, capable and talented, and to celebrate their hard work and accomplishments.