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Implicit Science Stereotypes Mediate the Relationship between Gender and Academic Participation

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Abstract

While the gender gap in mathematics and science has narrowed, men pursue these fields at a higher rate than women. In this study, 165 men and women at a university in the northeastern United States completed implicit and explicit measures of science stereotypes (association between male and science, relative to female and humanities), and gender identity (association between the concept “self” and one’s own gender, relative to the concept “other” and the other gender), and reported plans to pursue science-oriented and humanities-oriented academic programs and careers. Although men were more likely than women to plan to pursue science, this gap in students’ intentions was completely accounted for by implicit stereotypes. Moreover, implicit gender identity moderated the relationship between women’s stereotypes and their academic plans, such that implicit stereotypes only predicted plans for women who strongly implicitly identified as female. These findings illustrate how an understanding of implicit cognitions can illuminate between-group disparities as well as within-group variability in science pursuit.

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Acknowledgement

This research was generously supported and facilitated by the Derek Bok Center for Teaching and Learning at Harvard University during the first author’s post-doctoral fellowship there. We thank the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues for financial support in the form of a Grant-in-Aid award. We are also grateful to Alex Farias for his assistance with data collection and analysis, to Project Implicit at the University of Virginia for technical support, and to Nicholas Chan for assistance with manuscript preparation.

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  1. Bard College, P. O. Box 5000, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY, 12504, USA

    Kristin A. Lane & Jin X. Goh

  2. Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA

    Erin Driver-Linn

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  1. Kristin A. Lane
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  2. Jin X. Goh
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Lane, K.A., Goh, J.X. & Driver-Linn, E. Implicit Science Stereotypes Mediate the Relationship between Gender and Academic Participation. Sex Roles 66, 220–234 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11199-011-0036-z

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