I don’t know much about stereotype encouragement. Mostly I hear about stereotype threat, which strikes me as more than a little suspicious—smells like a Clever Hans or publication bias sort of situation.
There was earlier discussion of publication bias on this here (which makes sense given the attractiveness of the claim, along with general psychology research standards). This article is paywalled, but if it matches the abstract and is itself kosher, it shows a devastating pattern in the published studies:
The summary (abstract) of the paper Can stereotype threat explain the gender gap in mathematics performance and achievement?:
Men and women score similarly in most areas of mathematics, but a gap favoring men is consistently found at the high end of performance. One explanation for this gap, stereotype threat, was first proposed by Spencer, Steele, and Quinn (1999) and has received much attention. We discuss merits and shortcomings of this study and review replication attempts. Only 55% of the articles with experimental designs that could have replicated the original results did so. But half of these were confounded by statistical adjustment of preexisting mathematics exam scores. Of the unconfounded experiments, only 30% replicated the original. A meta-analysis of these effects confirmed that only the group of studies with adjusted mathematics scores displayed the stereotype threat effect. We conclude that although stereotype threat may affect some women, the existing state of knowledge does not support the current level of enthusiasm for this as a mechanism underlying the gender gap in mathematics. We argue there are many reasons to close this gap, and that too much weight on the stereotype explanation may hamper research and implementation of effective interventions.
That was a surprisingly difficult article to obtain; Google Scholar failed, my UWash access as usual didn’t work on Psycnet, a straight fulltext search failed, and when I finally found the journal in Ebscohost, the PDF download didn’t work! After a while, I figured out that I could email the citation—with PDF attached—to myself. Here it is:
EDIT: I had to laugh at this from the conclusion (or should that be cry?):
Third, we only included published studies. We believe that this is reasonable, because it is difficult to determine the scientific credibility of unpublished data. Furthermore, we do not think that a possible file drawer effect, which is the likelihood of missing articles that have not been published, would change our conclusion. More likely than not, unpublished studies would have found no differences between experimental conditions, although we can only speculate about this.
I don’t know much about stereotype encouragement. Mostly I hear about stereotype threat, which strikes me as more than a little suspicious—smells like a Clever Hans or publication bias sort of situation.
There was earlier discussion of publication bias on this here (which makes sense given the attractiveness of the claim, along with general psychology research standards). This article is paywalled, but if it matches the abstract and is itself kosher, it shows a devastating pattern in the published studies:
That was a surprisingly difficult article to obtain; Google Scholar failed, my UWash access as usual didn’t work on Psycnet, a straight fulltext search failed, and when I finally found the journal in Ebscohost, the PDF download didn’t work! After a while, I figured out that I could email the citation—with PDF attached—to myself. Here it is:
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/5317066/2012-stoet.pdf
EDIT: I had to laugh at this from the conclusion (or should that be cry?):