• Question: What is your opinion on gender stereotypes and how they may influence someones behaviour?

    Asked by anon-203188 to Vassilis, Tirso, Matthew, Jane, Dawn, Alexandra on 9 Mar 2019.
    • Photo: Matthew Longo

      Matthew Longo answered on 9 Mar 2019: last edited 9 Mar 2019 12:32 pm


      There a big literature on this, which has found large and systematic effects. Claude Steele from Stanford University has done fantastic research investigating this in the context of academic performance. He and his colleagues have shown that highlighting specific features of one’s identity (such as gender or race) can affect performance dramatically, an effect he has called ‘stereotype threat’. Steele’s book ‘Whistling Vivaldi’ is definitely worth reading if you’re interested in this topic.

      Other work by Sian Beilock and her colleagues at the University of Chicago shows that maths anxiety of teachers can also have big effects of student achievement (https://www.pnas.org/content/107/5/1860).

      This work shows that it’s really important to understand the consequences of such stereotypes and find ways to reduce their effects so that everyone can achieve their full potential.

    • Photo: Dawn Rose

      Dawn Rose answered on 12 Mar 2019:


      There is also some great research about stereotypes in orchestras – and how gendered the stereotypes are.
      On a related matter, I must say that sometimes psychology can contribute towards stereotypes because so much of the data we generate is about group means or ‘norms’. For example, we often divide anticipants into groups based on sex, but now there is a big debate about how this should be adapted to gender and how we word questions about that subject ethically.
      It is also not helpful the language psychology sometimes uses, like deviation from, atypical, normative, etc. But it is a reductionist science so we have to find a way to do experiments too…
      Interesting question that is tricky to answer!

    • Photo: Vassilis Sideropoulos

      Vassilis Sideropoulos answered on 15 Mar 2019:


      A gender stereotype is a generalised view or preconception about attributes or characteristics, or the roles that are or ought to be possessed by, or performed by women and men. When people are gender stereotyping there’s an impact on others behaviour. For example, there’s a lot of gender stereotyping in toys, and children often think in a more complex way as to how to play with toys that are categorised for specific genders. A research work showed how children induced complex thinking and behaviour when they had to play with female stereotyped toys. Other examples is performance anxiety as Matthew stated, in a different context a lot of males who want to engage in Literacy studies feel uncomfortable because it is a female stereotyped science. There are so many different example, and the outcome is the same – there’s an impact on others behaviour when one gender stereotypes!

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