Knowing is half the battle: Teaching stereotype threat as a means of improving women’s math performance

ABSTRACT—We tested whether informing women about stereotype threat is a useful intervention to improve their performance in a threatening testing situation. Men and women completed difficult math problems described either as a problem-solving task or as a math test. In a third (teaching-intervention) condition, the test was also de-scribed as a math test, but participants were additionally informed that stereotype threat could interfere with women’s math performance. Results showed that women performed worse than men when the problems were de-scribed as a math test (and stereotype threat was not discussed), but did not differ from men in the problem-solving condition or in the condition in which they learned about stereotype threat. For women, attributing anxiety to gender stereotypes was associated with lower per-formance in the math-test condition but improved per-formance in the teaching-intervention condition. The results suggest that teaching about stereotype threat might offer a practical means of reducing its detrimental effects. Research on stereotype threat suggests that women and mi-norities underperform on mathematical and intellectual tests, in part because of a concern that their performance might confirm negative stereotypes about their group (see Steele, Spencer, & Aronson, 2002, for a review). Studies have shown that anything that reminds women or minorities of their stigmatized identity can reduce their performance on a stereotype-relevant task. In fact, simply knowing that a test is meant to be diagnostic of one’s abilities in a stereotype-relevant domain is often enough to trigger stereotype threat (Steele & Aronson, 1995). The po-tential consequences of this phenomenon extend beyond just test performance; stereotype threat may also reduce motivation to achieve in stereotype-relevant domains (Davies, Spencer, Quinn, & Gerhardstein, 2002). The robustness of these effects and the potentially profound implications for stigmatized individuals ’ success has led to a pronounced interest in how to combat stereotype threat. Exist-ing research has provided some solutions. Exposure to positiv