Prejudice

Prejudice is a negative or hostile attitude towards a particular group of people based on generalizations and incomplete or distorted information. Prejudice is often synonymous with superstition, belief in an event that is not supported by meaningful arguments. Almost all of us are subject to some degree of prejudice, whether directed against an ethnic, national or racial group, against people with different sexual preferences, against a particular geographical area chosen as a place of residence, or against specific food.

According to E. Aronson, there are four main causes of prejudice:

• economic and other competition or conflict

Prejudice grows when times are stressful and there is conflict between the mutually exclusive goals of different groups of people. See →

• repressed and displaced aggression

People tend to turn their aggression against groups that they don’t like, that are highly visible, and that are relatively powerless. And then they explain it «as if rationally.» This is how prejudices are born. See →

• personal needs
• conformity to existing social norms.

Gender bias

Most often, people do not notice their gender prejudices. Many, and this applies equally to both men and women, subconsciously believe that women are much less versed in such sciences as physics and mathematics. Shown (Furnham, A., E. Reeves, and S. Budhani, Parents think their sons are brighter than their daughters: Sex differences in parental self-estimations and estimations of their children’s multiple intelligences. J Genet Psychol, 2002. 163: p . 24-39) that parents, regardless of reality, evaluate the mathematical abilities of their sons higher than the abilities of their daughters. Teachers also tend to overestimate the abilities of boys and underestimate girls (Helwig, R., L. Anderson, and G. Tindal, Influence of elementary student gender on teachers’ perceptions of mathematics achievement. J Educational Res, 2001. 95: p. 93– 102). Men themselves highly value their intellectual abilities, or rather, overestimate: men predict their IQ on average 5 points higher than it actually turns out during testing, and women, on the contrary, underestimate theirs by the same 5 points. School-aged boys firmly believe that they do extremely well in mathematics and in every way better than girls, even when they actually do the same (Else-Quest, NM, JS Hyde, and MC Linn, Cross-national patterns of gender differences in mathematics: a meta-analysis, Psychol Bull, 2010, 136: pp. 103–127).

Scientists have ways to measure the strength of such unconscious prejudices. For example, offer to solve a simple problem, the answer to which will be the judgment “Dad is a professor of mathematics”, and measure the time for solving it. It takes more time to solve a similar problem, but with the answer “Mom is a professor of mathematics” or “Mom is the chief engineer of an enterprise”, because it takes some time to overcome the resistance of prejudice. This difference in time is the measure of the power of prejudice. Harvard is running an online project called Implicit. It allows you to measure your subconscious prejudices in various areas, including gender issues. The project works in more than 70 languages, including Russian, so you can ask:

In one study, researchers took data on gender bias from this project across 34 countries and compared the severity of gender attitudes to how boys and girls differ on math tests. It turned out (Nosek, BA, et al., National differences in gender-science stereotypes predict national sex differences in science and math achievement. Proc Natl Acad Sci USA, 2009. 106: p. 10593–10597) that the weaker the prejudice, the closer results in natural sciences and mathematics for boys and girls. Moreover, it is hidden, implicit prejudices that are important, and not formal equality or “political correctness”. In countries with low prejudice, such as Sweden or Iceland, women performed as well or better than men on tests, and in highly prejudiced countries, such as Turkey, men far outperformed women. There are no countries on our planet without gender prejudice yet.

Gender bias can influence the comparative performance of women and men in the same mathematics in many ways. One well-known phenomenon has been called stereotype threat (Picho, K.,., A. Rodriguez, and L. Finnie, Exploring the moderating role of context on the mathematics performance of females under stereotype threat: a meta-analysis J Soc Psychol, 2013. 153: pp. 299–333). Its essence is that if a person belongs to a group about which there is a negative stereotype in a certain situation, then this person experiences anxiety that his behavior can, after all, confirm this stereotype, and his results worsen. So, if a woman performs work for which, according to the stereotype existing in society, she is less adapted than a man, in a situation where this stereotype somehow reminds of herself, then the quality of her work decreases. For example, girls’ performance in math worsens when they are tested in a situation where they are constantly told that math is not for women, that no one expects them to show good results, since they are girls, and what with them demand, and so on. It comes to the ridiculous: the results decreased when girls were obliged to come to the test without fail in skirts, thereby emphasizing their feminine nature (this is the question of school uniforms!).