Stereotype threats

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In our September cover story, we commented on the dearth of women in engineering (“Where are the women?” p. 32). Based on a recent study, one might assume women are simply not smart enough to excel in such a demanding field. John Philippe Rushton, professor of psychology at the University of Western Ontario, says he found that men are smarter than women (and not just in science and math) by 3.63 IQ points.

What prompts such research, and should it take place at all? It's difficult for someone trained in science and math to contend that some studies aren't worth doing. And I was uneasy with the uproar that forced Lawrence H. Summers to resign as president of Harvard after questioning whether innate differences between men and women might explain why fewer women succeed in science and math careers.

But let's look further at the potential problems with studies like Rushton's that might address the questions like the one Summers put forward. First, we can't even define intelligence, let alone devise tools to accurately measure it. (Click here for a link to criticisms of Rushton's study.) But more pernicious is the damage that publication of the dubious results can cause.

As other studies have shown, a phenomenon called “stereotype threat” causes people prompted to think about negative stereotypes to conform to them. Specifically, women tend to perform poorly on math tests if you suggest to them before asking the questions that they might. But University of Texas psychologist Matthew S. McGlone has conducted a study showing evidence of a countervailing effect. When prompted to think about stereotypical strengths rather than weaknesses, people perform better.

In McGlone's study, he presented identical math tests to two groups of college students, each containing men and women. For one group, he prefaced the math test with questions about coed housing and other aspects of campus life that bring gender issues to the forefront. For the other group, he prefaced the math test with questions about how each student had come to be accepted at the elite liberal-arts college they were attending.

The result: Women subjected to the stereotype-threat questions about gender underperformed men by 25 to 30%. For the other group? “There was no significant difference between men and women,” McGlone reported.

The so-called study Rushton performed and the question Summers posed amount to pervasive, culture-wide, and self-fulfilling stereotype threats that discourage women from trying to excel.