Stereotype Threat: An Enemy of Stem Developing

Abstract

Stereotype threat (ST) is a situation when one is apprehensive of confirming a negative stereotype about the competences of their social group. For example, there is a stereotype that womenare worse mathematicians than men. Thus, women solving math problems are overloaded withpressure (they don’t want to confirm the stereotype due to poor performance). This effect isstronger when they are suggested, even subtly, that their results can be compared to men’s performance. Since the most often effect of ST is performance impairment, this phenomenon can signifi-cantly impact the gender gap in such domains like mathematics or informatics. Two studies suggesting that negative effects of ST can be reduced or even reversed and that the susceptibility toST is corelated to intellectual helplessness (IH; a type of learned helplessness common in school)are presented in this paper. The experiments indicated that individuals reporting extremely lowlevel of IH produced paradoxical effects of ST (performance improvement instead of impairment).These results suggest that some changes in educational policy could reduce effects of ST amongfemales and to increase the number of women active in STEM.