Toni Schmader, UBC: The Biases that Bind Us: How Stereotypes Constrain How We Think and Who We Become

The following are my notes from Schmader's presentation at the HBS Gender & Work Conference, February 28, 2013.


William James: How to make sense of the “booming buzzing complexity” of the world. Stereotypes are schemas to make sense of our world. Mental “binders of women,” “dogs,” “cities,” etc.

Women: 13-17% representation in TV, Wikipedia, Hollywood, Op-Ed writers, etc.

We assume that people are what we see people do. Women must be caring, nurturing, and men must be more leaderly. Some empirical evidence for differences, but statistical effect sizes are small.

Stereotypes constrain the paths we take, and the way we think.

Dads as important gatekeepers: Croft, Schmader & Baron (in prep): Dads play a strong role in girls’ perceptions and beliefs. Egalitarian dads (in attitudes and domestic contributions) lead to higher future aspirations in daughters, play preferences for more gender-neutral and male-typed tasks and toys. 

Cheryan,Plaut, Davies, Steel (2009) experiment: Women less interested in computer science if “male” environmental cues are present (e.g., masculine posters in the room).

Communal messages for why to be an engineer (e.g., “build a better world”) attracted more women (and communal men) to engineering [back to Eagly’s work on gender differences invalues].

Being stereotyped strains cognition. Stereotype threat (Steele & Aronson) leads to poor performance.  Combining "I am woman," "I want to do well," and "Women don't do well," leads to cognitive doubts, attempts to suppress these thoughts, difficulty with regulatory attention, physiological threat, conscious monitoring of performance (Schmader, Johns & Forbers, 2008).

Stereotype threat at work (Logel, Plaut, Davies & Steele, 2009). Self-fulfilling prophecies: Stereotype of leader = male. Perceptions of being a woman leads to women performing more poorly. Mediator: Men who were more dominant and flirtatious were better liked by women. [Killing women softly.]

Threat of "talking shop" with sexist men: Matched samples of male and female faculty members talking shop with male colleagues:  Male faculty were more engaged, female faculty were less engaged (Holleran, Whitehead, Schmader & Mehl, 2011).

Engineering: Stereotype threat. Negative conversation with male colleagues lead to stereotype threat (Hall Schmader & Croft, in preparation). 

What can we do?

  • Role models: Shape new associations, create a sense of possibility -- the information in our "binders" changes.
  • Foster belonging: Cross-group friendships leads to better appraisals of stress. [Professional couples? Men close with professional women, builds equality, awareness, respect for other women professionals?]
  • Change the climate (encourage mutual respect, positive interactions).
Hall, Schmader & Croft (in prep): Stereotype threat and negative organizational climate is the worst combination for women. Magnet analogy: It pulls men up, but pushes women away.

How stereotypes of men shape and constrain their behavior and cognition. "Until we expect men to have it all, women can't have it all, either."

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A Tale of Two Women -- Who Exercised Their Professional Independence

Image
May 2018, Vancouver BC Jody Wilson-Raybould’s story has triggered memories of professional trauma for me, like watching Christine Blasey Ford’s testimony last fall triggered memories of sexual trauma for many women. The way Wilson-Raybould has been treated represents a pattern of pressure applied to women who dare assert their professional independence, voice, and decision-making power. Most cases just aren’t made public. Wilson-Raybould and I were each welcomed to our professional appointments (as Attorney General of Canada and as Montalbano Professor of Leadership Studies: Gender and Diversity at UBC’s Sauder School of Business , respectively) with publicity and fanfare that celebrated diversity and the goodness of the White men who put us there. But when those men realized they couldn’t control how we carried out our professional duties, everything came crashing down. Each of us got in trouble for exercising our right to make independent judgments in our professional capaci
Read more

Jack Dovidio, Yale: Included but Invisible? The Benefits and Costs of Inclusion

Image
The following are my notes from Dovidio's talk at the  HBS Gender & Work Conference , February 28, 2013. Social inclusion is essential to equality. Discrimination is systematic exclusion. Exclusion is painful. But superficial inclusion cloaks injustice and takes the form of subtle contemporary bias. Contemporary bias: there are explicit attitudes about racism and sexism and there are implicit attitudes. Explicit and implicit attitudes are only weakly correlated. Most Americans (80%) say they're not racist or sexist [explicit attitudes], but 60-70% of the population is racist/sexist according to implicit measures of bias. Most people will rely on explicit attitudes when a situation is unambiguous, and when what needs to be done is absolutely clear. Most discrimination occurs when a situation is ambiguous (i.e., what is right and wrong behavior is not defined) or justifications are possible for racism and sexism (such as "merit"). Devine (1989) study of Black and
Read more

Peter Glick, Lawrence University: BS at Work: How Benevolent Sexism Undermines Women and Justifies Backlash

Image
The following are my notes from Glick 's  HBS Gender & Work Conference  presentation, February 28, 2013. “The battle of the sexes will never end -- there's too much fraternizing with the enemy” - Henry Kissinger Paradox: The interdependence of the sexes -- male dominance coexists with intimate dependence on women. Ambivalent sexism theory ( Glick & Fiske, 1996 ): Dominance & intimate interdependence lead to hostile sexism (HS, directed toward women who threaten male power) and benevolent sexism (BS, directed at women who conform to feminine ideals, serve men’s needs), respectively. Sample items of HS and BS . BS is a pedestal: A narrow and confined space, difficult to stay up on, especially in high heels. BS justifies HS, fosters unrecognized, patronizing discrimination, elicits backlash when resisted, saps women’s career ambitions, makes inequality more palatable. For men, BS protects self image, they can see themselves as not an oppressor, but rather as a provider
Read more