The Scientific Gender Gap

It seems that one has to say something silly and controversial (ala Larry Summers) in order to draw attention to the problem of females in math and science. And that's a shame, because the gender discrepancy remains a very serious societal problem. According to the latest statistics from the NSF, women represent approximately 20% of the math and science faculty at top research universities. This discrepancy is terrible for science, which is missing out on a large pool of potential talent. It's bad for women, who must struggle to enter an important sector. Most distressingly, it's a problem that remains stubbornly in place: Although the gender gap in math and science performance has shrunk substantially (and even been reversed on some tests), girls and women still feel less positively toward math and science than their male peers. Despite the fact that women have earned slightly more science and engineering bachelor degrees than men since 2000, they remain far less interested in pursuing these disciplines as careers.

A new paper by social psychologists at the University of Amherst, and published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, offers a novel explanation for this seemingly intractable gender gap. I'm most interested in their longitudinal field experiment which involved the careful observation of an actual calculus class taught by male and female professors. Here's Shankar Vedantam, in Slate, describing their results:

They measured, for instance, how often each student responded to questions posed by professors to the classroom as a whole. At the start of the semester, 11 percent of the female students attempted to answer questions posed to the entire class when the professor was male, and 7 percent of the female students attempted to answer questions posed to the entire class when the professor was female. By the end of the semester, the number of female students who attempted to answer questions posed by a male professor had not changed significantly: Only 7 percent of the women tried to answer such questions. But when classes were taught by a woman, the percentage of female students who attempted to answer questions by the semester's end rose to 46.

The researchers also measured how often students approached professors for help after class. Around 12 percent of the female students approached both male and female professors for help at the start of the semester. The number of female students approaching female professors was 14 percent at the end of the semester. But the number of female students asking for help from a male professor dropped to zero.

The psychologists borrow a metaphor from medicine to explain their results, describing the effect of seeing a female professor as a kind of "social inoculation." The question, of course, is what the students are being inoculated against. What unconscious biases are canceled out when a woman teaches a math class?

The first obvious candidate is stereotype threat. Simply put, stereotype threat occurs when people are undermined by negative stereotypes about themselves. The concept was pioneered by Claude Steele, who discovered the effect by looking at disparities in performance between white and African-American undergraduates at Stanford. When Steele gave a large group of sophomores a set of questions from the Graduate Record Examination (GRE), and told the students that it would measure their innate intellectual ability, he found that the white students performed significantly better than their black counterparts. This discrepancy conformed to a large body of data showing that minority students tend to score lower on a wide variety of standardized tests, from the SAT to the IQ test. However, when Steele gave a separate group of students the same test but stressed that it was not a measure of intelligence - he told them it was merely a preparatory drill - the difference between the scores of the white and black students was much closer.

Not surprisingly, the stereotype threat effect seems to also play a major role in gender differences in science and math. In a study published in 1999, Steele and colleagues replicated the basic methodology of their initial experiments, giving a large group of undergraduates a difficult math test. Before the test, students in the first group were primed with a negative stereotype and told that such math tests generally demonstrate a gender difference. Students in the second group, on the other hand, were told that these exams reveal no sex differences.

The results were striking. In the group primed with a stereotype, the average male scored three times higher than the average female. However, in the group without a stereotype, this effect disappeared: the math scores of men and women were virtually identical. The psychologists note that stereotype threat has broader implications for the progress of women in science:

This process may also contribute to women’s high attrition from quantitative fields, especially math, engineering, and the physical sciences, where their college attrition rate is 2 1⁄2 times that of men. At some point, continuously facing stereotype threat in these domains, women may disidentify with them and seek other domains on which to base their identity and esteem.

Steele is even blunter: "Women may reduce their stereotype threat substantially by moving across the hall from math to English class." One last point: I think the power of seeing a female calculus professor is magnified by the absence of similar figures in mass culture. In a 2002 study led by the psychologist Paul Davies, two groups of male and female undergrads were shown three minutes of television commercials. Students in the first group were shown a variety of "gender stereotyping" ads, such as a woman gleefully touting the benefits of a skin product, or a "slender female" talking about the deliciousness of diet soda. (All of the ads were real.) Students in the second group, in contrast, were shown a mix of gender-neutral ads, such as a pitch for an insurance company and a commercial about cell-phones. Then, the women were quizzed about their interest in pursuing a career in math or science. Once again, the results were depressingly clear: Women exposed to the gender stereotyping ads were far less interested in anything quantitative. Instead, they were more than twice as likely to choose careers in the verbal and service industry, such as retail, sales and communication. The pattern was reversed, however, in the women who saw neutral ads. They were actually more interested in pursuing quantitative careers. All it took was the absence of a blatant stereotype to increase their interest in math. While I don't expect television commercials to get better anytime soon - pop culture is full of persistent tropes - it turns out that we've got a fix for the negative effects of these stereotypes. The cure is female math teachers.