New research appearing this week in Science (published by the American Association for the Advancement of Science, also the publisher of Science Careers) suggests that reaffirming personal values in a simple writing exercise could help women overcome sexist stereotypes.
The study (subscription required), led by psychologist Akira Miyake of the University of Colorado at Boulder, looked at 399 male and female college students in a 15-week introductory physics class. During the first and fourth weeks, a group of students were asked to write for 15 minutes about personal values such as family and friends that were important to them. The researchers found that women who had taken part in the value-affirming exercise went on to obtain better grades than women in the control group, who wrote about their least important values. No real difference was found for male students, reducing the well-documented gender gap in physics exams performance.
Improvement of academic performance following the value-affirming exercise was most striking for women who subscribed to the stereotype that men are better at physics. Looking at the control group, the researchers also found that the more female students believed in the stereotype, the worse their grades. Such pattern disappeared in the value-affirming group however.
"The fact that we found a large reduction in the gender gap for affirmed women tells you that some psychological processes are affecting women's performance on exams and how powerful those influences are," Miyake says in a press release. "Writing self-affirming essays improved the affirmed women's exam performances by alleviating their anxiety related to being seen in light of negative stereotypes about women in science."
It's hard to extrapolate research results to other situations, and Miyake is quick to point out that however promising such value-affirming approaches are "not a silver bullet that magically makes the gender achievement gap disappear altogether." But it seems a simple and short enough exercise to want to give it a try when facing a situation with sexist stereotypes attached, being taking an exam or doing research in a male-dominated environment.
