What can I do when stereotype threat is playing games with my head?

To give an example, I once had to take an IQ test at school in seventh grade. One section of the test included rotating three-dimensional objects in your head. The test was designed so that each section starts easy and then gets progressively harder. It is supposed to get so hard that there comes a point where you can’t continue any longer and then the tester stops that section of the test. On that section of the test, I managed to hit a window on the score because I got to the very end, having correctly answered all the questions in the object rotation section. The tester, who did these tests for a living, was astonished and he said he had never seen anyone come close to getting all of them.

As an adult, I heard the stereotype that women cannot rotate three-dimensional objects in their head. I heard it many times. Since I started hearing that, I have lost my ability to do so. I’ve tried some rather basic tests on this skill and I can hardly do any of them.

What can one do about this sort of thing?

As a female geek who is interested in science and tech discussion on the Internet (Slashdot, Digg, Hacker News, Reddit, etc.), I constantly see science and tech geeks declare over and over again that women’s brains are hard-wired against processing math, tech, and the mental rotation of 3D objects. When I was younger and already pursuing a geeky degree that involved math and tech, I took an online quiz measuring my ability to mentally rotate 3D objects to “check” if I had the “hardware requirements” to belong in my program. (I’m sure I’m not the only science-interested female student who has done something similar!) Of course, looking back, this is an absurd and unfortunate social consequence of evolutionary psychology intersecting with sexism. My math and computer course grades more directly measured my math and computer success, while my 3D mental rotation quiz score was far from the original point, which was to do well in my math and computer courses.

ReducingStereotypeThreat.org, a web site by two psychology professors from Columbia University and CUNY, lists methods to reduce stereotype threat aimed at other psychology researchers who want to reduce stereotype threat in their participants, but the web page is still useful to everyone else and research-backed.

My favourite is the last section, “Emphasizing an incremental view of intelligence”. Basically, some people generally believe that intelligence is “fixed”, while others generally believe that intelligence can be developed over time. People who believed in “fixed” intelligence tend to avoid challenging tasks and are more affected by stereotype threat. Conversely, people who believe that intelligence is malleable are more likely to focus on “improving rather than proving ability to themselves or others” and are more likely to “increase effort to further learning and to overcome obstacles”.

The section also describes a psychology experiment from 2007 involving female students and math learning:

In this study, students were randomly assigned to one of two learning environments in which they watched an educational video that taught new math concepts from either an entity ["fixed" intelligence] or an incremental ["malleable" intelligence] perspective. They then solved math problems under either stereotype threat or non-threat conditions. Results showed that when females learned the new math concepts with an entity perspective, they performed less well on the math test in the stereotype threat condition than in the non-threat condition. However, when they learned the new math concepts portrayed from an incremental perspective, there were no differences between the stereotype threat and the non-threat conditions on the math test.

Moreover, encouraging an entity theory even appears to harm performance. For instance, attributing gender differences in mathematics to genetics reduced performance of women on a math test compared with conditions in which differences were explained in terms of experience or effort. In other words, the concern with confirming abilities believed to be fixed or biologically-determined can interfere with one’s capability to perform well.

These studies suggest that stereotype threat can be reduced or even eliminated if an incremental view of ability is emphasized. Doing so involves emphasizing the importance of effort and motivation in performance and de-emphasizing inherent “talent” or “genius.” Individuals who are encouraged to think in incremental terms will tend to react more effectively to challenge and are less likely to fear confirming negative stereotypes of their group.

If your question boils down to “why are there so few women in science/computer science/mathematics/engineering/physics, and what should we do?”, we’re unlikely to answer, please see this list of resources to turn to.

A questioner writes in response to me saying:

Actually I think it would be a very good idea to have another discussion of “What are some things each of us can do to help improve gender ratio in STEM?”

The resources page you link to is extremely valuable but it’s challenging to go from there to specific actions. I think there’s enough energy in the area that a post on this would be very well timed, and could highlight existing Geek Feminism resources.

Mainly what I want to avoid with that proviso is going around and around and around with the same theories and potential solutions that have been outlined, tried and discussed for years by hard working academics, activists and people on the ground as if it’s novel territory. (Because our comments policy doesn’t allow it, you don’t see it a lot, but we get a lot of “last week, I noticed that my CS class is 95% males, and then I thought about my sister and her friends and how they don’t like computers. Have you ever considered that women don’t like computers, Geek Feminism blog?”) But our questioner does suggest a different, more in-depth, tack to me. Thanks questioner!

So, for people actively working on women-in-STEM (science, tech, mathematics, engineering) problems, what have your successful approaches been? Are there any follow-up activities, groups or research you wish you could do but don’t have resources? Have you created resources that you are ready to share and are looking for takers? Could you provide expertise of some sort to related projects?

And on the other hand what looked good but didn’t pan out, and do you have any ideas why?

This one came up on the Python Diversity list:

How can we gather data on the gender balance and other aspects of diversity at our conferences without asking attendees intrusive questions? Is having numerical data not that important? But without it, if our female attendance goes from (say) 150 to 180 or to 120, we might just eyeball the crowd and think, “Not enough”, not realizing that we’re doing something important right or wrong.

Skud, Terri and I had a conversation about this in comments last year, focussing more on making it optional than on doing it without questions at all.

Mary:

How do you suggest tracking the diversity of speakers? Gender can be approximated but not perfectly measured by looking at people’s first names (especially if you don’t have an ethnically diverse conference) but in general the problem we have with linux.conf.au is that we can’t see how to do this well without a demographic questionnaire, which women especially have repeatedly said they don’t want to see because they feel like they will then attend the conference as A Representative of Womankind.

Skud:

Yeah, that’s hard. Can you make the question optional, and link it to an explanation of why you’re asking it? Something like, “$conf supports diversity and is working on improving the mix of speakers at our event. To this end, we are trying to measure our progress. If you don’t mind, could you give us a few demographic details?”

If that’s still not culturally comfortable, you can get an approximation by just working off what you know. Eg. “Of the people we know, N are people of colour/from other countries/mid 20s or younger/whatever.” After the conference, you will know more of the people (esp. first-timers), and be able to adjust the figures accordingly.

We went on to discuss Australian/US/Canadian cultural differences, namely that Australians (linux.conf.au is an Australian conference) are used to, at best, much more limited demographic questionnaires from, for example, employers, grant funding organisations and so on than people in the US and Canada.

What do you think, folks? Do you attend events that use demographic questionnaires? How do they go down, culturally? Are they optional or compulsory? Is there a third way between that kind of measurement and educated guesses?

Given Terri’s recent post about the same few women always being speakers, I thought this would be a good place to write about how one conference I help out with, Ohio LinuxFest, has tried to expand their array of women speakers. For those interested in pretty graphs, I’ve been graphing women speaker proportions at various LinuxFests on the GeekFeminism Wiki. This post was co-authored with Moose J. Finklestein, the Content Chair.

Some conference organisers will say “we didn’t get any submissions from women” to explain the lack of women on their stages. As of two years ago, the Ohio LinuxFest was in that category. With a little outreach effort, and embracing diversity as a core value, the Ohio LinuxFest has successfully recruited more women to share their experience at OLF.

How’d we do? While last year only five of the speakers at Ohio LinuxFest were women, out of a total of 31, this year 14 of the 38 speakers are women. That’s a third of the conference speaking slots! One of the two keynoters is a woman. There were 107 talk proposals for the 27 general speaking slots. Before anyone tries to suggest that we simply took them all, it should be noted that a full 48% of the proposals for talks categorised as not assuming high levels of prior knowledge (making them suitable for the most attendees) were from women.

We believe that much of this success is attributed to community outreach. This year, we contacted Ubuntu Women, Debian Women, LinuxChix, DevChix, and the FSF’s Women’s Caucus mailing list about the call for presentations, and did it have an effect!

Recognising the various concerns women speakers can face, we tried to specifically address potential issues in the email sent to women-focused mailing lists. Some of these known issues include lack of confidence in new speakers, not being clear what the intended audience is, or the “imposter syndrome,” where someone doesn’t recognize that they are qualified to speak on a topic. The woman to woman dialog made the difference.

We wanted to make sure people weren’t refraining from submitting because they lack confidence in their technical abilities (an excuse we’d heard before), so we explained the attendees’ demographics, hoping to get more proposals that would fill the gap we had for user-aimed talks. Ohio LinuxFest has everything from home desktop users who started using Ubuntu a week ago (or even that day!) to seasoned system administrators who love Slackware, Gentoo, or NetBSD. Nevertheless, beginner proposals have tended toward introduction to development topics, not leaving enough for people who want to be users, not developers. We also made sure to mention that it’s a great crowd who is very welcoming of first-time speakers.

Women are involved with more than just speaking at the Ohio LinuxFest. Beth Lynn Eicher has been actively involved as a director for 6 years now, and the current staff, all volunteers, is about 35% female.

The Ohio LinuxFest takes pains to create a weekend conference friendly to all people, not just women. The diversity statement includes gender, ethnicity, disability, sexuality, and even operating system — folks who don’t use Linux are just as welcome as those who love it. There are regularly talks about or including BSDs, interoperability in heterogeneous environments, and cross platform free software.

Additionally, all speakers are instructed to keep the content of their presentations clean. The Ohio LinuxFest bills itself as a family friendly conference and aims to keep it that way. As an effort to make a positive effect with the community at large, the Ohio LinuxFest will host the second annual Diveristy in Open Source Workshop on September 12, 2010.

Looking at the growing trend of more female influence on the OhioLinuxFest we’d like to see it be the leader for more women to attend and become more involved with other free software interests.

If you have links of interest, please share them in comments here, or if you’re a delicious user, tag them “geekfeminism” to bring them to our attention. Please note that we tend to stick to publishing recent links (from the last month or so).

Thanks to everyone who suggested links in comments and on delicious.

• if you’ve got a question you think a geek feminist could answer, post a comment in reply to this post. (Comments will not be publicly visible.)
• about a week from now I’ll distribute questions to my co-bloggers and they can make a post with an answer to a question as they like
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If your question boils down to “why are there so few women in science/computer science/mathematics/engineering/physics, and what should we do?”, we’re unlikely to answer, please see this list of resources to turn to.

Questions will be accepted until comments on this post close in about a fortnight. (I don’t want to accept them constantly, because of the work of anonymising them.) If you miss out and find comments have already closed, another round will run in a couple of months. You can also ask questions non-anonymously in Open threads, although they may not be promoted to the front page.