Recently I
had an interesting juxtaposition of
experiences.
The first
was attending a meeting at which some women scientists, all in academia, spoke.
They all agreed that hard work, being passionate about what you do and
following your dream were the keys to success. I felt a bit uncomfortable with
that as I know many women who worked hard, were passionate about what they did
and followed their dream and are no longer scientists, at least in the sense of
being actively engaged in research. During questions at the end they were asked
if women are at a disadvantage when it comes to careers in science. 'No, no'
they all agreed, ignoring the accumulated data. In fact, they unanimously
claimed, if anything being a woman was an advantage, since women are more
visible.
The other
was reading Claude Steele's book WhistlingVivaldi: And Other Clues to How Stereotypes Affect Us. (The title comes
from the experience of a young black man. He found that people often reacted to
him with fear until he started whistling classical music. The act of whistling
classical music was enough to replace the stereotype 'violent young black man'
with the stereotype 'educated individual'.) Claude Steele is the discoverer of
the phenomenon of stereotype threat, in which being a member of a group that is
stereotypically thought to be worse at some task can reduce performance on that
task. One of the phenomena he describes in Whistling
Vivaldi is what he calls 'over-efforting'. Essentially this describes
students who fail to use effective strategies, presumably from a desire to
prove themselves as individuals. One example he discusses is a notoriously
difficult course that was required for entry into medical school. Many students
would audit the course in one year and take if for credit the next or find ways
of substituting a different course. However, while white and Asian students
were happy to use these strategies, many black students would insist on taking
on the course for credit even when, from the point of view of getting into
medical school, it would have been strategically better to withdraw and either
take it for credit the following year or substitute a different course. This
led Steele, who is black, to question the advice he received from his parents
that the key to success was hard work. He goes on to discuss an interesting
experiment performed by O'Brien and Crandall
(http://psp.sagepub.com/content/29/6/782.short). A standard way of testing for
stereotype threat is to have two groups sit a test. For one group membership of
a particular group is made relevant; for the other, membership of that group is
minimised. For example, if a group for which gender has been made relevant sit
a maths test then the women tend to do worse that the men whereas if the group
has been told that gender is not relevant then men and women perform the same.
What O'Brien and Crandall did was have the groups do an easy maths test and a
difficult maths test. Making gender relevant actually improved women's
performance relative to men on the easy maths test but made women's performance
worse on the difficult maths test. Steele suggests that responding to
challenges by working hard is a successful strategy up to a point but fails
when the challenges become more difficult.
The
question this juxtaposition of experiences raised in my mind was: what should
the message we give young women be? Should it be 'Work hard and you can achieve
anything'? Or, should it be 'These are the potential difficulties and here are
some strategies to get round them'?
