Adolescent girls under stereotype threat: The effect of masculine traits on analytical performance and confidence
Date Issued
2008
Date
2008
Author(s)
Hsiang, Le_Chi
Abstract
The secondary school educational environment in Taiwan has changed from single-sex to co-educational nowadays according to the reason of sex equality and the welfare of personality development. Spencer, Steele & Quinn (1999) found that giving female subjects the message of “Women perform more poorly than men on the math test” with male presence would worsen their math performance, while the “Women and men perform equally well on the math test” message makes them perform as well as men do. The present study intends to understand if local adolescent girls’ performance and confidence on analytical performance (the general mental ability of math and scientific knowledge) will also be affected by the gender stereotype threat (GST), if they react differently due to their masculine traits level, and if the message of “Women and men have distinctive superior math abilities” can increase adolescent girls’ performance and confidence. This study, meanwhile, also tries to know if different developmental stages such as university and high school students and the coeducation and single-sex educational environment would cause women react differently to GST. 241 female college students (116 with male presence, and 125 without male presence) and 270 female senior high school students (114 from coeducational school, and 126 from single-sex school) were randomly allocated to one of three reading tests conditions (increasing GST [Women perform more poorly than men on the math test] vs. without GST [the absence of message about sex] vs. reducing GST [Women and men perform equally well on the math test]) and separated into high/low masculine traits groups by the Chinese version of BSRI (Lee, 1981). The three factors ANCOVA on the with/without male presence condition(2) × messages (3) × high/low masculine traits groups (2) finds that “without male” presence will do harm to female college students while “with male presence” will worsen senior high females’ performance. The “Increasing GST”message makes female college students with male presence and female high school students with low masculine traits consider the test to be harder. The “reducing GST”message surprisingly does not benefit them but causes negative effects to college and high school students with low masculine traits and high school students with male presence. On the whole, this study supports the hypothesis that with/without male presence and GST messages do affect adolescent girls, college and senior high school students are affected in different ways, and female college and high school students with high masculine traits are least affected by GST.
Subjects
stereotype threat
gender stereotype
math
instrumental traits
masculine traits
single-sex education
SDGs
File(s)![Thumbnail Image]()
Loading...
Name
ntu-97-R93227121-1.pdf
Size
23.53 KB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum
(MD5):fcda01bcb6970517c1e4fdbaa7dfc63d