Clearing The Air: Gender Stereotypes

Article 1: Target Article
Davies, P. G., Spencer, S. J., & Steele, C. M. (2005). Clearing the air: Identity safety moderates the effects of stereotype threat on women's leadership aspirations. Journal Of Personality And Social Psychology, 88(2), 276-287. doi:10.1037/0022-3514.88.2.276
Davies and colleagues explored how stereotype threat could potentially decrease the decision for women to accept leadership positions. The authors predicted that from watching gender stereotypic TV commercials, the women would choose to take helping roles versus leadership roles. In the first study, there were 30 men and 31 women randomly placed into groups where they were selected to watch the gender-neutral or gender stereotypic commercials. They then read
a leadership task and had to choose the role of the leader or a helper. The second study was done to see if taking away the susceptibility of stereotypes would result in reestablishing the women’s interest in leadership roles, even if they were already shown the gender stereotypic commercials. 58 men and 58 women were randomly assigned to groups and used the same commercial groups from study 1. After watching the commercials, they were randomly chosen to read the same description of the leadership task just as study 1, or chosen to read a modified one that was made to remove women’s effects to stereotype threat. The first study confirmed that women exposed to commercials of stereotype threat towards them tend to avoid leadership positions more than the women who weren’t exposed to them. The second study showed that the want for leadership roles can be restored by identity safety variables, even after being exposed to stereotype threat. The men in both studies did not show any significant differences. The authors suggest future research to test appropriate trials of stereotype activation in all types of settings.

Article 2: Research
Bergeron, D. M., Block, C. J., & Echtenkamp, B. A. (2006). Disabling the able: Stereotype threat and women's work performance. Human Performance, 19(2), 133-158. doi:10.1207/s15327043hup1902_3 To see how women in the workforce may be effected by stereotypes, Bergeron and colleagues explored how well women performed in a leadership role after being exposed to a stereotype threat. The researchers hypothesized that women would do worse than men in masculine stereotyped roles. 45 men and 70 women from a psychology program participated in the study. 45% of the participants were not currently employed, 34% had part-time jobs, and 21% had full-time jobs. Each participant was assigned individually to a managerial role where they had to make decisions from reading memos, which was recorded on a questionnaire. The participants were randomly chosen to have either a more masculine or feminine manager description, which was created implicitly by using a more feminine or masculine stereotyped jos, such as nursing versus accounting, and specific adjectives to implicitly suggest a more feminine or masculine role. The results concluded that the authors hypothesized correctly: women exposed in the stereotype threat environment, the masculine sex role-typed position, did worse both in quantity and quality on the decision-making questionnaire than the women in the feminine sex role-typed position. Also, the men did better than the women in the masculine sex role-typed position for quantity, but equal for quality. The authors suggest future research to further and better examine the effects of stereotype threat in a masculine sex-typed field.

Article 3: Review
Lamont, R. A., Swift, H. J., & Abrams, D. (2015). A review and meta-analysis of age-based stereotype threat: Negative stereotypes, not facts, do the damage. Psychology And Aging, 30(1), 180-193. doi:10.1037/a0038586 Lamont and colleagues studied how people may be worried about proving an undesirable stereotype threat about their group to be true, which might cause them to do poorly on a stereotype related task.
Specifically, the authors focused on the negative stereotypes of older adults, which included doing worse on cognitive and physical tasks. The authors reviewed age based stereotype threat literature, 22 published and 10 unpublished articles, testing the same research topic. They also researched a variety of manipulations of the research topic, such as including fact-based, experimental-based, gender, cultural and economic status with the age-based stereotype threat. Overall, the conclusions came out to show clear evidence that older adults’ cognitive performance and memory is negatively affected by threat from age stereotypes, even across different genders and ethnicity. Also, older adults are more likely to be threatened by stereotype-based manipulations than fact-based. Further research is encouraged to find out the extent of age-based stereotypes, like if it affects working memory more or less. This literature review contributed to how stereotypes of groups can directly affect people in a negative
way.

Article 4: Citation
Infanger, M., Bosak, J., & Sczesny, S. (2012). Communality sells: The impact of perceivers' sexism on the evaluation of women's portrayals in advertisements. European Journal Of Social Psychology, 42(2), 219-226. doi:10.1002/ejsp.868 Infanger and colleagues researched how effective women characters in advertisements are when they are portrayed as either stereotypical or opposite of stereotypical.
Also, they examined how assessments of those women by the viewers are influenced by their attitudes towards women. There were two similar studies that investigated how women characters in advertisements are judged when they are shown as stereotypical or not. 64 women and 43 men chose to participate in the first study, an online questionnaire, which included questions that were intended to measure either hostile sexism or benevolent sexism toward women. Participants were then shown 2 pictures of stereotypical women and 2 pictures of non-stereotypical women in a randomized order, where participants evaluated them with four 6-point scales, such as useless-valuable. 72 women and 36 men participated in the second online survey similar to the one in the first study, changing small things to make a more controlled study. The first study showed that the stereotypical women in the advertisements were assessed more positively than the women who were not shown as stereotypical. Also, the results showed that benevolent sexism exhibited to be a good interpreter for the assessment of stereotypical female characters, whereas hostile sexism had no effect on assessing non-stereotypical female characters. The second study showed the same results, except for hostile sexism did show to be a good interpreter of assessments of women
characters in advertising. Because of that difference, the authors suggest future research and replications of the study since the differing results do not make them confident about their conclusions.