These readings made me want to both take more IATs and not take anymore. On the one hand, I don’t want to take anymore because it seems like it will tell me things I do not want to know about myself. I like to consider myself a good person that does not blindly follow stereotypes, but the reading suggests that I do follow those stereotypes much more than I would like to think I do. On the other hand, it would probably be to my benefit to take more IATs to illustrate to myself what/who I am biased against. This would likely help me catch patterns of my thinking that might be leaning into stereotypes. I think it would be beneficial to at least acknowledge when I am listening to stereotypes I should not be.

Both readings made me think about intersectionality. Throughout the readings, we were largely talking about one specific group that faces the negative effects of stereotypes. It seems hard enough to handle the disadvantages of being negatively stereotyped, but when you begin to think about intersectionality it is a whole other ballpark. As a white woman, I understand how challenging it can be to be the only woman or one of a few women in a male-dominated space. In female-dominated I am able to feel comfortable because they are likely to be majority white and I feel comfortable in that space in a way that black women cannot. At least there are frequently spaces that I can go to where I don’t face stereotyping, but for people that fall into more than one stereotyped category, that is far less true.

Throughout the readings, I was also thinking about a unit we did about women in the workplace in my FYS. During this unit, we talked about imposter syndrome, which is when you feel like you are not qualified to do/be something even though you totally are. This seems to me very similar to stereotype threat. One way I felt this in my own life has always been in math classes. Every time I took any sort of calculus throughout high school and college I always got an A even though I would never have called myself good at math. When I was reflecting on that during my FYS it was clear that I never felt good at math because I always had this subconscious understanding that women were not meant to be in STEM and so this is probably not an area I would have thrived in. It always felt like much more of a risk to me to take classes like Calculus because I was telling myself that I probably would not be good at them, even though my past was telling me the opposite. It is frustrating to be able to see that, but also not feel like I can do much to change it because even though I recognize the stereotype I still find myself giving in to it.