UPDATE: I changed the title of the post, as the original one (which is the title of the article I discuss here) was perhaps not sufficiently clear.
(Thanks to Chris Fraser for the pointer, hidden in a comment he added to a post over at Leiter's blog of 2009! Quite amazing that I noticed this at all.)
I've just read a fascinating article on the positive effects of female role models in motivating young female students to pursue their interests in a given 'male' area. The article reports on research done by psychologists at the University of Massachusetts (Amherst), led by Nilanjana Dasgupta, on the effects of exposure to expert female role models. The research was focusing on mathematics and engineering, but the results certainly generalize beyond, in particular to philosophy.
The methodology used was the Implicit Association Test, in which participants are asked to associate pairs of words, and on the basis of their reaction time, conclusions can be drawn as to the implicit biases possibly in operation. (Everybody should take this test at least once; when I took it, the result was that I had moderate negative biases towards the target group I was testing for!) When explicitly asked what their attitude was towards math and engineering, the young women consistently denied believing in the motto 'math is for boys' or such like, but what the results of this research suggest is that, on the implicit level, the stereotypes were very active.
Young women taking a word-pairing test in which they had to rapidly react to terms such as “good” and “joy” versus “bad” and “pain,” and group them with “calculus” and “algorithm” versus “literature” and “poetry,” betrayed implicit negative attitudes not shared by male peers. They were slower to react when asked to group together “math” with “good” than “math” with “bad.” They were also relatively faster to react when asked to group together “literature” with “good” than “literature” with “bad.” Young women also revealed less implicit identification with math than their male peers.
But then, those who were exposed to expert female role models significantly changed their results in the word-pairing test.
The researchers conducted two laboratory experiments and one longitudinal field study in a real college-level calculus class to explore ways to intervene early to protect young women’s self-concept from negative feelings about STEM subjects. They found that exposing them to expert female role models could inoculate them against negative stereotypes. The longitudinal study also found that the benefits endured over time.
So exposure to expert females in areas which are otherwise stereotypically associated with maleness has the effect of a 'vaccine', which 'protects' these young women from reinforcements of stereotypes which they are likely to encounter in many years to come. Desgupta continues:
“We’re using the term ‘stereotype inoculation’ as a medical metaphor. Like a vaccine, female role models inoculate or protect girls and women’s interest in STEM professions and make them more resilient to societal stereotypes (the virus). What was most exciting to us was that implicit negative feelings toward math expressed by these young women reversed and became strongly positive after they had contact with female role models in math and science. Similarly, implicit dis-identification with math became strong identification after they had contact with female role models.”
I think these results are fascinating and super duper important. It has always been my belief that one of the best ways to redress gender imbalance in philosophy or any other area is the presence of inspiring female role models, hence all the noise concerning conferences with all-male lineups of speakers and such like. These results lend strong empirical support to this belief, and give us further clues as to what can be done.
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