In Education circles, there has been a lot of concern about
women and math. On the positive side,
there are no clear differences in the performance of boys and girls in math
classes up through the end of high school.
On the negative side, once women get to college, they tend to take fewer
math classes and fewer classes in the math-heavy sciences than men.
There is also evidence that women sometimes perform more
poorly on important tests of math achievement than they should given their
ability. That is, their scores on these
tests do not reflect their true ability, because of a phenomenon called stereotype threat. Stereotype threat was first described by
Claude Steele and Joshua Aronson in a 1995 paper in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. The basic idea is that if you are a member of
a group that is the subject of a negative stereotype, then your concern about
showing that stereotype to be valid can harm your performance. So, women who know that there is a stereotype
that women are worse than math at men may do poorly on tests of math
achievement just because they are aware of the stereotype.
Stereotype threat has been an important area of research,
and I have written about it before in this blog. One stream of work relating to stereotype
threat tries to find ways to eliminate it.
An interesting set of studies in that vein was presented by Chad Forbes
and Toni Schmader in the November, 2010 issue of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. They were particularly interested in the
difference between women’s attitudes about math and their beliefs in
stereotypes about math performance. This
issue is important, because it is possible that women are less likely than men
to pursue math because they don’t like it.
It is also possible that they don’t pursue math because they are
concerned they might do poorly.
Forbes and Schmader designed procedures to change women’s
attitudes and beliefs about math (at least temporarily). To influence attitudes, they had people do a
task in which they had to classify words.
Some of the words were related to either math (like addition) or language (like paragraph). Participants had to press a button to
classify the words. Other words were
either positive or negative. Some
participants had to press the same button to respond both to the math words and
the positive words and to use a second button to respond to the language and
negative words. A second group did it
the opposite way (math and bad on one button and language and good on the
other). Other research suggests that
doing this task can give people a more positive attitude about the concept
paired with good words.
Later in the experiment, participants were given the opportunity
to work on different kinds of problems, and some of them were math
problems. Participants could choose
which problems to work on. Women in this
study were more likely to choose to work on math problems when they were given
the training that math is good than when given the training that math is
bad. However, this training did not
influence their performance on the problems.
That is, they did not solve a higher percentage of the problems when
trained to have a more positive attitude about math.
In another study, participants got training related to the
stereotype about math. In this case,
they classified items either as math-related or language-related or things that
women are good at or that men are good at.
The group that was trained to discount the stereotype used one button to
respond both to things that women are good at and to math words and to use the
other button to respond to things that men are good at and language words. A second group did the task the opposite way
(women are good at and language words; men are good at and math words).
Later, the participants did math problems. In this case, women who were given training
to help them discount the stereotype actually performed better on the later
math test than those who got training that was consistent with the
stereotype. The researchers also gave
participants a test of their working
memory capacity. Working memory is
the kind of memory you need to use when you are solving problems. It refers to the amount of information you can
keep in mind at once. In general, having
more working memory is better than having less when solving math problems. Previous research has found that stereotype
threat situations decrease people’s working memory capacity. Forbes and Schmader found that the training
to discount the stereotype increased women’s working memory capacity.
There was a lot of detail here, so let me try to
summarize. Improving women’s attitude
about math made them more likely to choose to do math problems, but not more likely
to do better on those problems. In
contrast, changing women’s belief about the stereotype affected their
performance on math problems, but not their willingness to do math.
These results suggest that if we want to increase the number
of women who participate in math and science careers, it will be important to
influence both attitudes about math and beliefs about stereotypes. The results of this study suggest that both
are possible.
