Women and mathematics: The power of nonconsciously activated stereotypes

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Word Count without Notes: 1,748

Abstract
In four studies, conducted in four independent laboratories situated in three countries, subtle cues
such as the presence of a female experimenter or the subliminal activation of gender stereotypes
influenced women’s math attitudes and math performance. These results provide direct evidence
of the connection between quite subtle yet ordinary features in the environment and mental
processes (both cognitive and affective) that can potentially cause women’s continued under-
representation in math and science. The plasticity of math attitudes and performance as a
function of the social situation optimistically points to conditions that could address existing
gender disparities in aspirations and performance in math and science.
Word Count = 98
 Women and mathematics 2

Women and mathematics: The power of nonconsciously activated stereotypes

Although women are increasingly becoming mathematicians and scientists (1, 2), their
entry into these fields has been slower than in other fields such as law and medicine (3, 4).
According to a recent report from the National Science Foundation, the proportion of women in
science and engineering decreased steadily as degrees advanced. Despite mounting access to
educational opportunities, women still receive less than one fifth of the doctoral degrees awarded
in math and the physical sciences (6). In addition to being under-represented in these areas,
women as a group continue to under-perform relative to men on standardized tests of
achievement in mathematics (7). Although this gender difference in performance is steadily
declining, a significant male advantage continues to exist at the high school level and beyond (7,
8).
The cause of such differences has been a matter of great debate. Benbow and Stanley (9)
suggested that a sex-based genetic difference in quantitative potential might be the cause since
“large sex differences in mathematical aptitude are observed in boys and girls with essentially
identical formal educational experience”. Other plausible explanations pointing to unsupportive
social structures for girls striving to excel at math and science have also been suggested
including diverging expectations and behaviors from parents and teachers (10, 11), as well as the
lack of positive female role models in these domains (4).
Neither of these accounts gives heed to the power of the immediate social situation in
creating gender differences in math and science achievement. That negligence arises from a
reasonable and widespread assumption that attitudes and achievement in intellectual fields are
stable and enduring – whether they are rooted in genetic predispositions or in long-term
socialization. In this paper we present four experiments that demonstrate the role of the
immediate social situation in creating systematic shifts in seemingly stable math attitudes and
achievement (12).
Our work takes up the intriguing possibility that the temporary salience of a negative
stereotype about women’s abilities in math can hamper women’s identification with mathematics
and, perhaps more critically, women’s performance in this domain (13). Research has
demonstrated that female undergraduates under-perform relative to men on a challenging math
test when the test is described as having produced gender differences, but not when it is
described as not having produced gender differences (14). Similarly, in an experimental setting,
women’s performance on a difficult test of mathematical ability was negatively correlated with
the male to female ratio of other people in the room (15). Such results demonstrate that math test
performance can be shaped by features present in the immediate environment, and is not
exclusively the result of natural talent or a stable set of learned skills.
Across four studies, we examined whether simple and subtle gender cues, often presented
outside participants’ conscious awareness, can shift women’s attitudes toward mathematics or
impede their performance in tests of mathematical aptitude. In the first set of studies, we
examined the effect of a subtle cue, the gender of the experimenter, on women’s implicit or
automatic attitude toward mathematics (16). In Study 1, thirty-eight female undergraduates at
Yale University were given, in random order, an implicit measure of attitudes towards math, an
implicit measure of gender stereotyping in math, as well as an explicit questionnaire about their
attitudes toward mathematics. Critically, either a male or a female experimenter administered
these measures.
 Women and mathematics 3

The Go/No-go Association Task (GNAT), a measure of strength of association, served as

the measure of implicit math evaluation (17, 18). Women’s implicit (or automatic) attitude
towards math was influenced by a mere shift in the sex of the experimenter. T-tests on reaction
times revealed that when a male experimenter presented the tasks, female participants showed
significantly greater negativity towards math through speed of associating math with positive
concepts (t(36) = 3.48, p = .001) than when the experiment was conducted by a female
experimenter. Notably, a sample of men (N = 37) showed no sensitivity to experimenter sex in
their implicit math attitudes (t(36) = .00, p = .99). And, comparisons between men and women
revealed that while women’s implicit math attitudes were more negative than men’s with a male
experimenter (p = .xx), no gender difference emerged when the experimenter was female (p =
.xx). A simple change to the immediate environment shifted women’s automatic orientations
toward mathematics. In this case, a competent female, compared to a male, experimenter in a
math study altered females’ own evaluations of that domain.
The benefit to women from the presence of a female experimenter may be constrained to
the particular role played by such a model – by serving as experimenter, that model represented
competence and authority. On the other hand, activating knowledge about women in general
ought not to produce such a benefit to women. In fact, quite to the contrary, women, when made
to think of their personal association with the category “female” (a group not associated with
math competence) should show a reduction in implicit positivity toward math. 44 women
attending Harvard University (19) formed mental associations to gender by answering either
gender-specific questions about their housing (e.g., identify pro’s and con’s of co-ed versus
single sex housing) or in a control condition, answered gender-irrelevant questions about their
telephone service (e.g., xxx). They then completed a measure of implicit attitude, this time using
the IAT (Implicit Association Test, a task conceptually related to the previous GNAT) (20). A
repeated measure ANOVA using log transformed reaction times as the dependent measure
confirmed more negative associations with math relative to arts among women when their
gender identity had been cued compared to a neutral prime (Finteraction (1, 42) 4.57, p= .04).
Despite the apparently mundane quality of the manipulations, reminding women of their
gender via thoughts about co-ed housing elicited more negative math attitudes compared to
control subjects (Study 2). And, presenting a sample of a counterstereotype (i.e., a female
experimenter conducting a math study) produced more positive math attitudes among women
compared to a more stereotypic context (Study 1). Automatic evaluations are sensitive to
contextual cues, even to cues so innocuous as to seem inconsequential.
If the immediate situation were to influence automatic evaluations, we might dismiss the
shifts as psychologically interesting, but not necessarily as affecting actual performance on math
exams. In addition, to rule out the possibility that the primes in the previous studies were not
truly implicit, we need to demonstrate that such effects are replicable even when the gender cures
are clearly operating outside conscious awareness. In the two final studies we demonstrate the
sensitivity of ostensibly stable constructs, like math ability, to cues that are presented outside
conscious awareness, in this case, subliminally presented gender primes (21, 22). These studies
extend the potency of the first two demonstrations by showing that (a) the input from the
immediate external world can influence both attitudes toward math and performance on math
tests and (b) such input need not be perceptually strong, direct, or even apparent to have impact.
In fact, in these experiments participants were unaware of “seeing” anything related to gender at
all and yet the effects of gender primes could be detected on performance on math tasks. (refs of
other studies showing sublilminal priming effects) In Experiment 3, 118 undergraduate women
 Women and mathematics 4

from the University of Amsterdam were presented with nonconscious male or female primes
(e.g., uncle, boy, tough or aunt, girl, sweet), and were subsequently asked to solve four (six for
Experiment 4) challenging calculations (23). A t-test revealed that nonconscious gender cues
significantly affected women’s test performance. Women who received female primes
performed significantly worse on these calculations than women who received a male prime
(t(116) = 2.14, p = .035). This experiment shows that the category “male” and “female” can
indeed be subliminally activated. What it shows in addition is that the stereotypes associated
with them regarding related concepts (such as the association to math) is not limited to a fleeting
thought but can influence intellectually significant, processing-intensive outcomes, such as
performance on a math test. The subtlty of this manipulation points to the potential ease with
which the immediate situation might be manipulated to produce effects on consequential
outcomes such as academic success.
To reinforce and further clarify the results of Experiment 3, Experiment 4 provided a
replication with an additional sample of 67 women from the Catholic University of Louvain in
Belgium, and with an added control condition of gender irrelevant primes (e.g., xxx). The initial
t-test comparing the performance of women in the female and male prime conditions directly
replicated the results of Experiment 3. Women primed with female words performed worse on
the test than women primed with male words (t(43) = -2.16, p = .036). Further t-tests comparing
the performance of participants in either gender prime condition with the control condition
revealed that this was driven primarily by the activation of the concept female (t(43) = -1.71, p =
.095), not male ((t(42) = .38, p = .70). Situationally activating gender, even outside of awareness,
demonstrates the harmful effects of the stereotypes about women’s inferior math aptitude on
performance. Other research has demonstrated the enduring and persistent effects of stereotypes
on math participation, perseverance and performance. Here we showed that those stereotypes
also have instant and insidious effects. Stereotypes need not be overt, direct, or conscious to
discourage and depress performance, they need only to be cognitively activated.
The findings reported in these four experiments underscore the ways that situationally created
reminders of gender and associated stereotypes can influence math attitudes and performance. If
the mere activation of female concepts and stereotypes is sufficient to negatively impact
women’s math evaluation and performance, the potential implications are significant. Gender
categories can be activated by any variety of innocuous events and influence subsequent
behavior. Those activations, and the subsequent behavioral effectgs, may play important roles in
the self-perpetuating nature of stereotypes. One obvious implication is the potential erroneous
attribution that observers and targets themselves may make about the internal causes of math
performance such as talent, knowledge, or motivation rather than about the external features
inherent in every situation. A female test-taker may seem (and be) less oriented toward math in
the presence of an unfamiliar man compared to an unfamiliar woman (Study 1); or if she had
been led indirectly to think about her link to her gender category (Study 2). And, unobtrusive,
even subliminal, female primes, reveal lower math performance than male or neutral primes
(Studies 3 and 4). The manifestation of subtle primes having subsequent influence on
performance may be manifest by the male-female ratio of test-takers, seemingly innocuous
questions relating to gender, or the paucity of female role models in math and science (13,14,15).
If women’s attitudes and performance are able to shift reliably in the presence of an
inconspicuous cue, it is important to consider the potential long-term consequence of stereotypes
on women’s preferences for math-related careers, performance in math-related domains, and the
 Women and mathematics 5

conditions under which women’s mathematical competencies are evaluated, by themselves and
by others.
Our data suggest that to keep individual women identified with mathematics, it will be
necessary to overcome limiting beliefs about the potential and ability of women as a group.
Such beliefs, we show can automatically hinder women’s attitudes and performance. Their fact
that the sources of influence remain outside conscious awareness or conscious control point to
the difficulty of individuals taking action to resist such influences. Women’s more positive
implicit math attitudes in Experiment 1 suggest that role models who by their presence create a
counter-stereotypic attribute to become associated with the group can indeed change attitudes.
 Women and mathematics 6

REFERENCES AND NOTES

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3. H. Gavaghan, Nature, 405, 715 (2000)
4. N. Dewandre, Science, 295, 278 (2002).
5. National Science Foundation, Women, Minorities, and Persons with Disabilities, (2000).
6. D. Johnson, Minorities and girls in school, (Sage, Thousand Oaks, CA, 1997).
7. American Association of University Women, Gender gaps: Where schools still fail our
children, (Marlowe, New York, 1999).
8. J. S. Hyde, E. Fennema, S. J. Lamon, Psychological Bulletin, 107(2), 139 (1990).
9. C. P. Benbow, J. C. Stanley, Science, 1980, 1262 (1980).
10. G. Leinhardt, A. M. Seewald, M. Engel, Journal of Educational Psychology, 71(4), 432
(1979)
11. J. E. Jacobs, J. S. Eccles, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 63(6), 932 (1992).
12. Three team of investigators, from Harvard University, Yale University, and a joint team from
the University of Amsterdam and the Catholic University of Louvain in Belgium,
independently made these discoveries and due to the converging findings, decided to report
the results collaboratively.
13. C. M. Steele, American Psychologist, 1997, 613 (1997).
14. S. J. Spencer, C. M. Steele, D.M. Quinn, Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 35, 4
(1999).
15. M. Inzlicht, T. Ben-Zeev, Psychological Science, 2000, 365, (2000).
16. For a complete report of the measurement of implicit math attitudes see B.A. Nosek, M.R.
Banaji, A.G. Greenwald, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 83(1), 44 (2002).
17. B. A. Nosek, M. R. Banaji, Social Cognition, 19(6), 625 (2001).
18. The design of the math attitude GNAT followed guidelines developed in previous research.
Words belonging to various categories (math [e.g., algebra, calculus], good [e.g., wonderful,
lovely], bad [e.g., terrible, horrible]) are presented sequentially in the middle of a computer
screen for a short time (550 or 650ms). In the critical phases, participants were instructed to
identify the words that represented target categories labeled at the top of the screen from
distracter words that did not belong to the target categories. Words were correctly identified
if the participant pressed the space bar before the word disappeared from the screen.
Sensitivity scores (d-prime) indexing participants ability to separate the target and distracter
words were calculated for four blocks of 96 trials in which the target categories were (1)
math and good, and (2) math and bad. The difference in sensitivity between blocks (1) and
(2) constituted a measure of implicit preference for math.

19. Of 50 original participants recruited for Study 2, the data from six women were excluded for
the final analyses either because she left the room to ask a question during the prime or
before the IAT was complete (n = 4), she was not a native English speaker (n = 1), or the
participant knew she had been primed (n = 1).
20. A. G. Greenwald, D. E. McGhee, J. K. L. Schwartz, Journal of Personality and Social
Psychology, 74, 1464 (1998).
The IAT consists primarily of two training trials and two critical trials. In the first
training trial, participants were presented on a computer screen with a series of math and arts
words and were asked to press a key labeled “left” when they saw a math word, and a key
 Women and mathematics 7

labeled “right” when they saw an arts word. The math words consisted of algebra, calculus,
computations, equations, geometry, math, and numbers. The arts words consisted of art,
dance, drama, literature, novel, poetry, and symphony.
In the second training phase participants were presented with pleasant and unpleasant
words, and were again asked to press the “left” key when they saw a pleasant word and the
“right” key when they saw an unpleasant word. Pleasant words included words such as
caress, gift, honor, laughter, and love, whereas unpleasant words included abuse, evil, grief,
hatred, and sickness.
In the first critical trial, participants were presented with all of the preceding words and
were asked to press the “left” key anytime they saw a math or a pleasant word, and the
“right” key anytime they saw an arts or an unpleasant word. After a counterbalancing trial,
participants were presented with the second critical trial. In this trial, all of the previous
words are presented, however, the appropriate key for math and arts words was now
reversed. Hence, participants were now asked to press the “left” key when they saw an arts
word or a pleasant word and the “right” key when they saw a math word or an unpleasant
word. By switching the appropriate keys we are able to measure the speed with which
participants associate math with pleasant and arts with unpleasant and compare that to their
speed of association when math is paired with unpleasant and arts is paired with pleasant.
Participants’ reaction times were cleaned and transformed according to Greenwald et al.
21. J. A. Bargh, P. Pietromonaco, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 43 (3), 437
(1982).
22. In the priming task, which was created based on earlier work (22), participants were told that
they would be presented with 30 letter strings appearing one by one on the screen, and that
their task was to indicate as fast as possible whether a string was an existing word or not by
pressing one of two computer keys. These thirty words were preceded by subliminal prime
words that were each presented for 17 milliseconds and were each masked by a random letter
string (“HENKOS”). This mask remained on the screen for 225 milliseconds and was
immediately followed by the target word. The target word remained on the screen until
participants responded. Between trials, there was a 1500 millisecond pause.
In both conditions, fifteen different prime words were used and all of these words were
used twice. The priming words used in the female prime condition consisted of the
following: woman, lady, miss, girl, sister, aunt, grandma, lipstick, jewelry, earring, flower,
dress, sweet, and doll. Words used in the male prime condition included: man, guy, mister,
boy, brother, uncle, grandpa, cigar, motor, hammer, soccer, beer, tough, and trousers.
23. Calculations included: 8*7*5/2; 2*13*13 – 15; (1000-24*22)/4; 168/3+11*14. Participants
were simply asked to solve these calculations and to type out their answers. The calculations
were presented one at a time and participants were told that they could take as much time as
they needed. A comparable set of six calculations was used in Study 4.
Some of the participants from Study 3 were asked to complete a measure of stereotype
activation roughly thirty minutes before beginning the study. Since the performance of these
participants did not differ significantly from the performance of participants not given this
task, we have collapsed all of these participants for simplicity of presentation.