A New Study Shows Why the “Stem is for Men” Stereotype Lingers

I am one of the six girls in a class of 45 students at my engineering college, and as confident as I am in my abilities, it’s hard to shake my imposter syndrome when I look around my classrooms. Being outnumbered is intimidating for anyone, but I know that this imbalance tells a story that’s bigger than me: Namely, it’s a story about a leaky pipeline. And just one element of that structural problem is stereotype threat.

Recently, Tamar Kricheli-Katz and Tali Regev, researchers from Tel Aviv University and the Interdisciplinary Center in Herzliya, Israel, respectively, co-authored a study on how the language we use in academic environments affects how women perform and perceive themselves there. They specifically carried out a study investigating the effect of gendered language — in this case, Hebrew, which just like French, Spanish, and German is gendered — on women’s performance on a math test.

By “gendered” language, Tali Regev explained in a Zoom interview that she’s referring to a language in which “there are two forms of a verb and there is just no gender-neutral way of saying that [verb], and the rule is to use the masculine form when addressing a group of people that has both men and women.” As a professor who writes exams that directly address her students, Regev continued, “I was wondering if that has any effect on how the female students perform.”

The study varied the form of the verb “answer” in a questionnaire given to women and men and found that women underperform compared to men when masculine forms are used to address them on the test. Interestingly, in one of the supplementary tests the researchers carried out, they found that women outperform men on a reading comprehension test about empathy when addressed using masculine generics. Therefore, encountering verbs and nouns with masculine forms seems to unconsciously invoke gender stereotypes, leading women to outperform or underperform men depending on different gender stereotypes.

This phenomenon has been studied in other capacities before and is known as “stereotype threat.” People often unconsciously conform to stereotypes assigned to their gender identity. In the case of this study, masculine words in the math test unconsciously activated the age-old gender stereotype in the minds of women test-takers and led them to fall back on the stereotype that math and science are for men. On the other hand, women have a positive stereotype about empathy and reading, so women still performed better on the reading comprehension test about empathy because encountering the wrong form of the grammatical gender made them unconsciously aware of the gender stereotype associated with that quality.

However, not all tasks are associated with gendered stereotype. To address this, the researchers also asked their subjects to compete in a word association test. Each participant was required to write a word starting with the letter “a”, and then the next word with “b” and so on. They were scored based on the number of correct words and the total length of all the words they wrote. Once again, they were addressed using masculine or feminine generics. In this experiment, too, the researchers found that women’s performance was negatively impacted when they were addressed using masculine forms. They explained that being addressed using the opposite form of grammatical gender made the women feel alienated and created a sense of “not belonging” even when the task was gender-neutral; women spent less time on their tests when they were addressed using masculine words, indicating that their intrinsic motivation to succeed decreased.

The role gendered language plays in creating more gender-inclusive environments cannot be overlooked. The way we are addressed — whether on an academic test, in the workplace, or in public — can impact our performance and perception of ourselves by affecting our thoughts and beliefs, even if unconsciously.

Tamar Kricheli-Katz emphasized the significance of the study’s findings. “Languages do not only reflect realities, but they also generate the behaviors and performances,” she told the FBomb. Language not only corresponds with the existing cultural beliefs and inequalities, she explained, but also participates in generating them because we use language every day when we address each other. This reinforcement means we are “enacting all the beliefs and stereotypes and norms that are embedded in our culture and language,” she added.

Moreover, the study also highlights the unusual and interesting way in which the brain perceives and responds to the nuances of language and, by extension, anything that might trigger gender-related stereotypes in the brain. Therefore, we must think innovatively to eliminate gender discrimination and remove elements that pertain to gender-related stereotypes from workplaces and academic settings.