Stereotype Threat

Context

When I first saw this week's blog topic of Claude Steele's theory of stereotype threat, I became so overwhelmingly excited. This idea is not only something that I am extremely passionate about, but it's also the premise behind my thesis research. I worked as a high school chemistry teacher in South Central Los Angeles in a historically underrepresented and impoverished neighborhood. The demographics at my school consist of 100% minority students (African American and Latino), and 100% of those students qualified for free or reduced lunch. My school is a title 1 school, which means we receive additional financial support from the government to help meet the needs of our students. My thesis is on what it means to be a female student of colour from this neighborhood, who wants to study in the STEM field.

Thesis Snippet

Objective #3: How do I empower my female students who have interest in science to pursue their academic desires (specifically STEM) without cultural or societal hesitation?”

In week three of my action plan I want to transition into looking at what stereotypes we as a class pose onto other groups of people, namely women in science. First students will take an online survey where they are asked to identify which women out of a group of individual photos, are scientists. This survey will force students to stereotype, label, and racially profile different groups of women. After making their selections, then, as a class we will go through who we thought were scientists and why. I will be using the data from student responses, as well as field notes on how students are justifying their responses. In order to being to teach the girls in my class to become agents of social change, they need to embody a strong sense of self-confidence and decision-making skills. At the career level, however, stereotypes of what women of colour are capable of producing a cycle of self-fulfilling prophecies: Stereotypes based on ethnicity have been shown to bias evaluations (Bodenhausen & Wyer, 1985). It has also been shown that after negative feedback, individuals internalized a reduced sense of self-esteem (Fein & Spencer, 1997). Increased pressure to perform can result in choking under pressure (Steele & Aronson 1995). Consequently, disparities in salaries related to poor performance can be justified. Individuals oftentimes become disillusioned and leave the organization. (Obioman Tickles Wowo Holland-Hunt, 2007). In their article “Advancement of Women of Color in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM) Disciplines,” authors Pamela Oboimon, Virginia Tickles, Adrienne Wowo and Shirley Holland-Hunt begin to discuss the barriers that women of colour must face in STEM disciplines. Being a woman of colour in a white-male dominant society is extremely difficult. Women have stereotypes and gender roles imposed upon them since before they are even born, and unfortunately, the effects of these stereotypes dehumanizing, “the effect of stereotyping is prejudice and the behavior is discriminatory” (Obioman Tickles Wowo Holland-Hunt, 2007). Taking time to identify how we are classifying women in science, and realizing why we are doing this will help to combat the subconscious categorizations we make towards other groups of people. Working in Watts, Los Angeles, the students who attend my school are accustomed to a difficult lifestyle, especially my female students. The located street directly behind our school congregates prostitutes daily around 7am who routinely make efforts to recruit our girls into their profession. These girls have little to no strong female role models who can grant them access to STEM curriculum; within this school’s nine years of existence, I am the first female science teacher to work here. Dialogue with my students unveils the tough attitude and disregard for others that students must embrace in order to walk to school or take the bus everyday. By demanding high expectations in the safe space of my classroom, I hope to help teach these girls how to love themselves, how to access the growing field of STEM, and how to be empowered young females who can be role models to. In week four of my action plan, I hope to bring in a woman of colour who is currently successful in the field of STEM. I will require that students write out questions for this person before they come into present to my students. This activity will hopefully give my female students a sense of hope and empowerment to see somebody who comes from similar social struggles that has found success. This conversation will also hopefully open up the eyes of my male students who may or may not have unknowingly subjugated and stereotype what it means to be a woman in science.

To reinforce the conversation about what it means to be a woman in today’s world, especially woman of colour who enjoys studying the STEM discipline, we will be watching the documentary MISS Representation in week 5 of my inquiry. The structure of this lesson will be a B-D-L, where I ask students to record what they think it feels like or what it feels like to be a minority woman in the 21st century in South Central Los Angeles in the before column, their thoughts, reactions and key ideas in the during column, and then a reflection on the documentary in the learned column. I then want students to blindly share their B-D-Ls with other students in the room so that we can create a sense of community surrounding what we do and do not know, misconceptions, newfound learning’s, and pose new challenges to how we perceive the world we live in.

In the last stage of my action plan, I am going to dare my students to defy the identities that society has given them, and use their racial and personal identities as an agent of empowerment. This will be done through dedicating an entire class period to looking up scholarships and opportunities that are specifically available to my students because of their unique and beautiful identities. Again, this will call upon the humanization component of my inquiry where students are using the labels given to them by themselves, their families, and society, but instead of using these titles in a demeaning manner, they are using them as keywords to search for financial aid, internships, research opportunities and pathways to college, career, and other forms of self-identified success outside of my classroom.

Living With Stereotype Threat

All in all, I chose to write my thesis on this topic because stereotype threat is a huge problem today, not only for my students but for me as well. Being a Sikh/Punjabi/Canadian woman in a post 9/11 American, who wants to change my career from teaching to now software engineering, I am receiving a lot of backlash not only from society, but from my own community. Prehistoric gendered ideals of what it means to be a woman and what my role should be continue to haunt me as I fight for a place in the computer science realm. Learned self-consciousness holds me back from pushing myself to be on par with my male counterpart. I, myself, am an empowered young woman and role model to my students and so I can face the challenges that stereotype threat induce because I chose to acknowledge them and their existence. I can't say the same for everyone else out there, which is why it is even more important that those of us minority women who choose to further ourselves in our education and defy cultural and societal expectations, do so in a loud manor.