Despite the efforts to break down gender stereotypes out there in the working world, many still exist. While we have come a long way, thankfully, from the “women answer phones; men are the boss” world, some stereotypes refuse to budge.
If you never see a woman in math-related fields, your brain automatically links men with math, and women with other things, and that’s what perpetuates this effect
Among the most persistent: women are bad at math. Unfortunately for ladies, there is proof that this one is holding on strong.
“In an experiment on bias, women who aced math problems were more often overlooked in favor of male applicants who performed worse,” writes author Sydney Brownstone in the article Making Hiring Decisions, Men and Women Still Assume Women are Bad at Math.
The study was outlined in the Proceedings of the Academy of National Sciences. Here’s how it went down. Participants of both sexes were divided into either an employer group or a job candidate group. The candidate group was tasked with adding up sets of two-digit numbers in a four-minute test (which can be done equally well by both sexes).
Those in the employer group were asked to choose the best candidate for a math-based job based on how well he or she performed on the test. Employers had limited information to make a decision. In some cases, they only saw the candidate. In other cases, they based decisions on the candidate’s self-assessment of how well he or she anticipated doing on the test. And sometimes, the employers had a chance to change a decision after they were told how the candidates had actually performed on the test, according to John Bohannon, in Gender Bias Seems to Affects Men’s — and Women’s — Perception of Women’s Math Skills. At the end of the experiment, the employers took the Implicit Association Test, widely in social psychology research, which measures unconscious bias.
Here is a quick rundown of the results:
- Both men and women alike followed the stereotype.
- When only provided a photograph of candidates, men were twice as likely to be hired for the simple math job, whether it was a man or women doing the hiring.
- The hiring bias remained when candidates self-reported their ability on the test (partly due to women underestimating their ability and men tending to overestimate).
- In the third scenario, where employers could change hiring decisions based on actual test results, employers still only picked women 43% of the time.
“More tellingly, the employers picked the job candidate who performed worse 19.5% of the time. Of the worse performers chosen over better mathletes of the opposite gender, 64% were male,” writes Brownstone.
Why is this important? It shows that people’s prejudices affect their judgment, as well as their ability to correct it.
However, there is hope. As women continue to push into the math, science and engineering fields, this stereotype may come less into play.
Ernesto Reuben, one of the authors of the study, suspects that lack of women in these fields could be what is fueling the power of the stereotype. “My personal take is that a lot of this is just unconscious processing by the brain,” Reuben says. “If you never see a woman in math-related fields, your brain automatically links men with math, and women with other things, and that’s what perpetuates this effect,” he is quoted as saying in Brownstone’s article.