Stereotypes are good

A "stereotype" is a cognitive shortcut " that is, it allows your brain to make a snap judgment based on immediately visible characteristics such as gender, race, or age. Your brain is hardwired to make quick calls, and that"s ok. The problem comes when we start to apply those stereotypes beyond that immediate impulse. That"s called "bias," which is basically a belief that a stereotype is true. For example, the stereotype that girls are bad at math can lead to the suggestion that some innate difference between women and men leads to this discrepancy. In reality, however, girls and women are just as capable as boys and men when it comes to math. The problem is that we live in a culture that bombards girls and women with the notion that math is hard and that they don"t need to worry their pretty little heads about it. And the well-documented "stereotype threat" means that when you hear that you aren"t supposed to be good at something, you underperform, often unconsciously. In the AAUW research report Why So Few? Women in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics, my colleagues compiled and analyzed several studies showing that any time students were primed with the directions that men were better than women at a certain skill, the men outperformed the women on the subsequent test of that skill. But when test takers were told that men and women performed equally well in that same skill, the test results evened out. In some cases, the women outperformed the men. Of course, the above example only takes into account an academic setting. Most of us stopped taking tests long ago, and most of us don"t work in the STEM fields either. But don"t forget that almost all major industries and institutions are still run by men " and usually tall, thin, white men, as Malcolm Gladwell points out in his book on rapid cognition, Blink. The rest of us get unconscious points off for every one of those four criteria we don"t meet " but just about everyone takes those points off, not just the tall, thin, white men already in power. Look at my implicit bias test " I take those points off of myself. What does this mean? As Gladwell explains in the context of interviewing a black person for a job, In all likelihood, you won"t be aware that you"re behaving any differently than you would around a white person. But chances are you"ll lean forward a little less, turn away slightly from him or her, close your body a bit, be a bit less expressive, maintain less eye contact, stand a little farther away, smile a lot less, hesitate and stumble over your words a bit more, laugh at jokes a bit less. Does that matter? Of course it does. " [The candidate]"s going to pick up on that uncertainty and distance, and that may well make him a little less certain of himself, a little less confident, and a little less friendly. And what will you think then? You may well get a gut feeling that the applicant doesn"t really have what it takes, or maybe that he is a bit standoffish, or maybe that he doesn"t really want the job. In other words, stereotypes and biases serve to unfairly and sometimes unintentionally keep qualified, capable people out of jobs or positions of power. Men are the bosses, while women are just bossy. Or not up to the challenge. Or busy taking care of the kids and wouldn"t want the additional responsibility anyway.