Women deal with many stereotypes in the workplace. We had just talked about in my Anthropology class that boys and girls are raised differently to fit in gender stereotypes. Boys are raised to be interruptive and dominant while girls are raised to be caring and a follower. I am glad we are moving away from the stereotype of who we see as leaders. Women are now more likely to pursue a leadership position, but still face others thinking she is too ‘bossy’ or ‘mean’. Many believe that they are taking on ‘masculine’ traits, as if women could not be their own boss.

The readings reminded me a lot of the ideas of intersectionality, especially the article by Dr.Hoyt. Women experience a variety of stereotype threats. Other identities such as ethnicities or race can factor into how others see them in the workplace because society’s idea of a leader is a White male. It is difficult to understand the experience of a woman in a leadership position as so many other variables factor into their experiences. I admire seeing women succeed in their field, even against all the obstacles and behaviors of others. It is refreshing to see a woman in power, and I hope there will be an era where we do not judge someone for not fitting a stereotype that has long been outdated.

My implicit bias test was associating female and male words with career and family. I was surprised that my result was little or no automatic association with the prior mentioned words. This was strange since I thought I would have had some form of an association with male and career since I am a man. I think the reason for this result is my own background. Both of my parents have worked full-time jobs. However, my dad has been the primary caregiver as he worked closer to home and picked me up from school during my childhood. My mother worked further away from home in the city. In addition, my mother came from a family where children were expected to go to university and work a full-time job. I am sure that this test is not completely accurate of my implicit bias, but I hope I have somewhat decreased the association between female and male  words with career and family. 

The paper by Dr. Hoyt sounded very familiar to me, because I actually wrote a lengthy paper about biases that prevent the successful representation of women in leadership (more specifically sports, politics, and business) in my 102 class. The conclusion that I came to is that societal expectations that lead to double binds and the lack of access to necessary resources are what result in this significant underrepresentation. I specifically remember reading a lot about communal and agentic traits and how they both are assets in a leader, but that they’ve been tied up in gender stereotypes. I think that Richmond has done a good job in encouraging students regardless of gender to take on leadership roles, but I’m curious what it will look like in the real world. My sister is 28 and is a certified Adult, and this reading makes me want to ask her if she’s experienced some of these stereotype threats.

Reading about the different biases and mindbugs hurt my mind a little bit, because it makes me wonder how many I have and may not realize. The fact that I consciously could be against a certain stereotype but automatically lean towards it is a little upsetting, because I can’t do anything about it unless I know about it, but how am I supposed to know about if it’s automatic?

I thought these articles were really interesting. In the first article it talks about how women are surprised that they have the women=family and men=career bias. I talked about that in my response paragraph to the implicit association test that we had to take cause I was genuinely surprised. I thought it was really interesting how it wasn’t just me that was surprised by that result. I was a little but confused by the section that was telling us how to change our implicit associations because they didn’t really give a solution. I know that these implicit biases are the result of cultural norms but I feel like there has to be a way to change them in order to create a society that is not focused around white people. I thought it was really interesting when they gave the example of that woman who donated equally to her college and to an African American college fund and how that did not get rid of the mindbug it just neutralized the issue.

According to the IAT I completed, my responses suggested “a moderate automatic association for Male with Career and Female with Family.” While I try to never categorize family or career by gender, I believe it is an implicit bias I have. According to the results of this study, 32% of people, also the majority, ended with the same result as I did. At the end of any of these tests, it is going to tell you that these implicit preferences have the potential to predict your future choices when it comes to “discrimination in hiring and promotion, medical treatment, and decisions related to criminal justice.” Based on this description, I am a little surprised that I automatically link males with career and females with family, even if it is only considered a moderate association. I would hope that in the future my results of this IAT will not come to be fully accurate as I never want to think of myself as having the ability to discriminate based upon gender.

Blindspot (108)

The “Blindspot” reading discussed stereotypes as unfiltered and unacknowledged biases against individuals.  Specifically, the author discussed the costs that have followed the stereotype that “American = White”, sharing the story of Wen Ho Lee, a Taiwanese-American, who was accused of turning over US nuclear secrets to China.  He spent time in prison and lost his job following this incident, all because “Americans” thought he was must have connections to another Asian country based on his appearance.  The part I thought was interesting was that the author stated that stereotypes are difficult to acknowledge because “they are often put into play without any feeling of personal animus or vengeance”.  This reminded me of our class discussion on how to evaluate moral arguments, as I wondered where incidents like this, based on stereotypes, would be evaluated.  And for the actors (the white Americans), would that argument have remained seen as moral if not for criticisms of stereotypes?  It is examples like these that emphasize the importance of recognizing biases and mindbugs and blindspots to prevent unnoticed discrimination.

As I am currently conducting research with Dr. Crystal Hoyt on growth mindset and stereotype threat (regarding drug/alcohol addiction), I was extremely excited to read her article “Managing to clear the air: Stereotype threat, women, and leadership” with Susan Murphy. In this post, I want to predominantly respond to the concept of stereotype threat as defined by the authors, because I think it pertains greatly to Critical Thinking as a course, and how we consume information. Stereotype threat is defined as “‘the concrete, real-time threat of being judged and treated poorly in settings where a stereotype about one’s group applies’ (Steele, Spencer, & Aronson, 2002, p. 385)” (p. 388). This so-called stereotype threat is what can cause female underrepresentation in the workplace and leadership positions of all types. As I mentioned in my Implicit Bias test post, I took a class last semester where we learned in-depth about the social implications of gender/sexual/racial/ethnic/ability/etc. underrepresentation at work, but Hoyt & Murphy hone in on the psychological implications. For people who do not fit the major social identities seen as a leader– white and male–, they may face great bias and discrimination. While stereotype threat occurs across many social identities as I mentioned above, Hoyt & Murphy broadly focus on women in leadership and how these individuals are impacted by stereotype threat. For women in leadership, stereotype threat is evoked in many ways, such as explicit exposure to sexist commentary, being in the numerical minority (i.e. one woman in a large conference room full of men), and in other cues such as the media. This can lead to what the authors refer to as “vulnerability responses” where the woman may disengage or have an inhibited performance at work as a result.

It worries me that stereotype threat remains so prevalent in all types of workplaces– ranging from wage jobs to the tech industry– and the psychological implications it has on the group deemed socially inferior (in this article, for women). I am hopeful that with training in different spaces and an activist push for equality at work for people of a wide range of social identities we can reduce the harm stereotype threat imposes.

Anna Marston

I took the test about women and careers. It showed that I have an implicit association to put men and work and women to home life. I was surprised by these results because I don’t think that women have to be homemakers and men have to work. I felt while I was taking the test that the test itself was associating certain things with men and when you said something different it would say it was wrong. In the end, it said that it was time-based which made more sense but I was still surprised that I had that implicit association seeing as I am a woman with goals for myself and my career.

I personally thought the portion of the reading, Social Mindbugs, was very interesting. I am a psychology major and am use to analyzing and thinking about what people are thinking but it is very interesting when applied in this social science context of critical thinking and conversation. The text mentions that “research suggests that selective brain regions appear to be active whrn we imagine the thoughts of another person… and when we try to predict the actions of others”. Due to the fact that humans are social creatures it makes sence that the brain would have specific regions for analyzing this type of information. This makes me wonder, do certain people’s brain structures dictate whether or not they are good critical thinkers? Are some peoples social analysis region of their brain more developed due to experience and learning, or just due to natural biology and genetics? This brings me to a social movement in pop culture today as people are realixing that different people think differently. As in, some people have a voice, an internal narative, while others have abstract, non verbal thoughts. I wonder if one way of thinking is more advantagious in social interaction?

In Blindspot by Mahzarin R. Banaji and Anthony G. Greenwald, the idea of the “Memory Mindbugs” caused me to recall the famous Central Park Five case. First off, the research Elizabeth Loftus did regarding witness testimonies and interrogations intrigued me because of the sheer number of wrongful convictions the Innocent Project has discovered in recent years. The Innocence Project is an organization dedicated to dismissing crimes among the innocent through DNA testing, and so far 250 people have been exonerated by tests that concluded they were innocent. This means there were 250 people wrongfully convicted of a crime, and there were most likely a number of them who suffered because of human memory mindbugs.

The Central Park Five also known as the Central Park Jogger case, revolved around the rape and murder of a 28-year-old white woman, along with the attacks of 8 eight other people, in 1989. The police immediately arrested and took 14 or more suspects into custody, resulting in the prosecution of the five defendants. The trials of these five defendants, who were all African American or Hispanic American, were primarily reliant on confessions which they had made after police interrogations. They all pleaded not guilty, but the four juvenile defendants served 6–7 years each while the 16-year-old was tried and sentenced as an adult and served 13 years in an adult prison. Out of all five boys, none of them had DNA that matched DNA from the crime scene. The primary form of evidence was the confessions made during police interrogations, where I believe it could be likely that police purposely modified their vocabulary in order to get the boys to confess. When reading about the memory mindbugs and the specific car crash example where the word “hit” and “smashed” were interchanged, I immediately began to think and wonder how the police investigation of the Central Park Five utilized the memory mindbugs.