research paper about stereotypes

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Editorial: The psychological process of stereotyping: Content, forming, internalizing, mechanisms, effects, and interventions

Baoshan zhang.

1 School of Psychology, Shaanxi Normal University, Xi'an, China

Fengqing Zhao

2 School of Education, Zhengzhou University, Zhengzhou, China

Fangfang Wen

3 School of Psychology, Central China Normal University, Wuhan, China

Junhua Dang

4 Department of Surgical Sciences, Uppsala University, Uppsala, Sweden

Magdalena Zawisza

5 Department of Psychology, Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge, United Kingdom

Stereotype is a pervasive and persistent human tendency that stems from a basic cognitive need to categorize, simplify, and process the complex world. This tendency is a precondition for social bias, prejudice, and discrimination. Amid the COVID-19 outbreak, the discrimination, exclusion, and even hostility caused by stereotypes have increasingly become an important social issue that concerns political and social stability. Therefore, the current issue focuses on a broad spectrum of research addressing four main themes: (1) the psychological processes involved in forming and internalizing social stereotypes, (2) the negative consequences of stereotypes, (3) the neurocognitive mechanisms underlying stereotypes, and (4) the interventions addressing the consequences of negative stereotypes in this era with changes and challenges. Specifically, the Research Topic consists of 13 papers by 54 scholars that target stereotypes among different social groups, including males and females, older people and young generation, minority races, people living with HIV/AIDS (PLWHA), people with mental health problems, juvenile transgressors, refugees, and Asian-Americans during COVID-19 outbreak. These studies are conducted in culturally diverse countries including Brazil, China, Germany, Hungary, and the USA, contributing to a more holistic picture of contemporary stereotypes.

1. The forming of social stereotypes

Negative stereotypes from the public may be influenced by our knowledge about and psychological distance to the target group, beliefs of group malleability, beliefs in the implicit change of traits, and moral values. For instance, Caldas et al. tested whether people's knowledge and proximity to the circumstances associated with juvenile transgression would influence their opinions about the proposal for reducing the age of criminal majority in Brazil. They investigated the passers-by in a public square and workers from the juvenile justice courts and found that people were more likely to hold negative stereotypes of juvenile delinquents if they were far from them. Paskuj and Orosz focused on the refugees as the most typically vulnerable group in turbulent international times, and they found that group malleability beliefs were negatively linked to dehumanization tendencies and threats perceived from migrants in Hungary. Protzko and Schooler examined a more general negative stereotype of youth also known as the “kids these days effect” (KTD effect). In two studies with American adults, belief in whether a trait changes over the lifespan was associated with such prejudices. In addition, Lai et al. focused on three cues linked to women's perceived high long-term mating value and reported that Chinese women displaying “sexually attractive” cues were perceived to have lower moral values. Moreover, they were stereotyped as having lower levels of humanness than women displaying “beautiful” facial cues or “virtuous” behavioral cues, which in turn led to lower mating opportunity.

Culture also plays an essential role in stereotype formation. Li M. et al. targeted stereotypes toward high-power individuals and revealed that people influenced by Confucianism held positive stereotypes of competence and warmth for senior high-power individuals. This finding is inconsistent with the traditional proposition that high-power individuals tend to be stereotyped as having high competence and low warmth. This might be because high-power individuals under Confucian culture are expected to have great social responsibility and concern for the wellbeing of others. Furthermore, new stereotypes emerged as a result of COVID-19 in the global context. COVID-19 is a threat to physical health, and mental health, and various reports have indicated that COVID-19 is closely related to stigma and discrimination. Two studies examined the stereotypes related to COVID-19. Zhao et al. found that the prevalence of COVID-19-related negative stereotypes was low in China. Besides, the more people know about COVID-19, the fewer negative stereotypes associated with COVID-19 they reported. Daley et al. on the other hand reported that Asian-Americans were facing increasing challenges from different ethnic groups on social issues related to COVID-19 in the United States, and the increasing tendency to blame China for the pandemic was associated with stereotyping Asian people as more foreign.

2. The consequences of negative stereotypes

People's negative stereotypes will influence their behavioral inclinations toward the target groups, and even the law-making at a general level. For instance, Wen et al. tested space-related stereotypes associated with people living with HIV/AIDS (PLWHA). They found that people who held negative stereotypes toward the spaces occupied by PLWHA were more resistant to visit such spaces, and people's threat perception and community evaluation mediated the effects of such space-related stereotypes on community-approaching willingness. In addition, Caldas et al. found that the more distant people were from juvenile transgressors, the more they held negative stereotypes toward juvenile transgressors and agreed with the law-making proposal for reducing the age of criminal conviction in Brazil.

Vulnerable groups may internalize the negative stereotypes and be influenced by them. Gärtner et al. tested the self-stereotyping of people with mental illness and found that negative stereotypes of their warmth and competence dimensions led them to develop negative emotions and thus exhibit higher levels of active or passive self-harm than mentally healthy people. In addition, Li J. et al. were interested in the gender self-stereotyping among college students and noted that gender self-stereotyping was positively correlated with relational and personal self-esteem and further correlated with higher life satisfaction only in the male sample. That is, gender self-stereotyping was associated with a higher level of self-esteem and life satisfaction among male students, while this effect did not hold for women.

3. The neurocognitive mechanisms of stereotypes

The neurocognitive mechanisms of stereotypes were explored by Wu and Zhao . They used RS-fMRI degree centrality (RSDC), a graph theory-based network analysis, to detect how negative stereotypes work in the brain. In a test of math-related stereotypes among female university students, they found that the RSDC of different brain regions was affected, reflecting that stereotypes are the result of the action of the brain network as a whole. For instance, a decrease in RSDC in the left hippocampus is a response to stereotype-related stress, and an increase in RSDC in the posterior parietal region (PPC) is a reflection of self-relevant processes induced by stereotypes.

4. The interventions addressing the consequences of negative stereotypes

Finally, two studies tested interventions against negative stereotypes via intergenerational contact and cognitive training. Long et al. found that simply intergenerational contact, or even just imagining it, reduced negative stereotypes of older people and increased perspective-taking toward older people among young adults. Chen et al. used the traditional IAT to compare the effect of multiple vs. single cognitive training on aging stereotypes in 12–13-year-olds. They found that multiple training tasks and additional intervention training sessions are recommended as they could significantly prolong the positive effects of the intervention.

Overall, these 13 papers discussed various aspects of stereotype formation, consequences, mechanisms, and interventions. We hope these papers will inspire future researchers in developing theories and conducting new interventions against negative effects of stereotypes. Since the current era of “black swan incidents” and related social challenges create perfect conditions for stereotypes to thrive and intensify, researchers should continue exploring the psychological mechanisms behind emerging social stigma and negative stereotypes. Especially, the development of neuroscience will provide further opportunities to study the brain mechanisms of stereotypes from a more microscopic perspective. This combined with macroscopic psychosocial mechanisms will provide new ways of addressing the severe dangers of negative stereotypes across contexts, countries and times and benefit targeted interventions and policy making.

Author contributions

All authors listed have made a substantial, direct, and intellectual contribution to the work and approved it for publication.

Conflict of interest

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

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Peer-reviewed

Research Article

Twenty Years of Stereotype Threat Research: A Review of Psychological Mediators

* E-mail: [email protected]

Affiliation Department of Psychology, Edge Hill University, Ormskirk, Lancashire, England, United Kingdom

• Charlotte R. Pennington, 
• Derek Heim, 
• Andrew R. Levy, 
• Derek T. Larkin

• Published: January 11, 2016
• https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0146487
• Reader Comments

This systematic literature review appraises critically the mediating variables of stereotype threat. A bibliographic search was conducted across electronic databases between 1995 and 2015. The search identified 45 experiments from 38 articles and 17 unique proposed mediators that were categorized into affective/subjective ( n = 6), cognitive ( n = 7) and motivational mechanisms ( n = 4). Empirical support was accrued for mediators such as anxiety, negative thinking, and mind-wandering, which are suggested to co-opt working memory resources under stereotype threat. Other research points to the assertion that stereotype threatened individuals may be motivated to disconfirm negative stereotypes, which can have a paradoxical effect of hampering performance. However, stereotype threat appears to affect diverse social groups in different ways, with no one mediator providing unequivocal empirical support. Underpinned by the multi-threat framework, the discussion postulates that different forms of stereotype threat may be mediated by distinct mechanisms.

Citation: Pennington CR, Heim D, Levy AR, Larkin DT (2016) Twenty Years of Stereotype Threat Research: A Review of Psychological Mediators. PLoS ONE 11(1): e0146487. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0146487

Editor: Marina A. Pavlova, University of Tuebingen Medical School, GERMANY

Received: June 23, 2015; Accepted: December 17, 2015; Published: January 11, 2016

Copyright: © 2016 Pennington et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License , which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

Data Availability: All relevant data are within the paper and its Supporting Information files.

Funding: The authors acknowledge support toward open access publishing by the Graduate School and the Department of Psychology at Edge Hill University. The funders had no role in the systematic review, data collection or analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.

Competing interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.

Introduction

The present review examines the mediators of stereotype threat that have been proposed over the past two decades. It appraises critically the underlying mechanisms of stereotype threat as a function of the type of threat primed, the population studied, and the measures utilized to examine mediation and performance outcomes. Here, we propose that one reason that has precluded studies from finding firm evidence of mediation is the appreciation of distinct forms of stereotype threat.

Stereotype Threat: An Overview

Over the past two decades, stereotype threat has become one of the most widely researched topics in social psychology [ 1 , 2 ]. Reaching its 20 th anniversary, Steele and Aronson’s [ 3 ] original article has gathered approximately 5,000 citations and has been referred to as a 'modern classic' [ 4 , 5 , 6 ]. In stark contrast to theories of genetic intelligence [ 7 , 8 ] (and see [ 9 ] for debate), the theory of stereotype threat posits that stigmatized group members may underperform on diagnostic tests of ability through concerns about confirming a negative societal stereotype as self-characteristic [ 3 ]. Steele and Aronson [ 3 ] demonstrated that African American participants underperformed on a verbal reasoning test when it was presented as a diagnostic indicator of intellectual ability. Conversely, when the same test was presented as non-diagnostic of ability, they performed equivalently to their Caucasian peers. This seminal research indicates that the mere salience of negative societal stereotypes, which may magnify over time, can impede performance. The theory of stereotype threat therefore offers a situational explanation for the ongoing and intractable debate regarding the source of group differences in academic aptitude [ 1 ].

Stereotype threat has been used primarily to explain gaps in intellectual and quantitative test scores between African and European Americans [ 3 , 10 ] and women and men respectively [ 11 ]. However, it is important to acknowledge that many factors shape academic performance, and stereotype threat is unlikely to be the sole explanation for academic achievement gaps [ 12 ]. This is supported by research which has shown “pure” stereotype threat effects on a task in which a gender-achievement gap has not been previously documented [ 13 ], thus suggesting that performance decrements can be elicited simply by reference to a negative stereotype. Furthermore, stereotype threat effects may not be limited to social groups who routinely face stigmatizing attitudes. Rather, it can befall anyone who is a member of a group to which a negative stereotype applies [ 3 ]. For example, research indicates that Caucasian men, a group that have a relatively positive social status, underperform when they believe that their mathematical performance will be compared to that of Asian men [ 14 ]. White men also appear to perform worse than black men when motor tasks are related to 'natural athletic ability' [ 15 , 16 ]. From a theoretical standpoint, stereotype threat exposes how group stereotypes may shape the behavior of individuals in a way that endangers their performance and further reinforces the stereotype [ 10 ].

Over 300 experiments have illustrated the deleterious and extensive effects that stereotype threat can inflict on many different populations [ 17 ]. The possibility of confirming a negative stereotype about one’s group is found to contribute to underperformance on a range of diverse tasks including intelligence [ 3 , 13 ], memory [ 18 , 19 ], mental rotation [ 20 – 23 ], and math tests [ 11 , 24 , 25 ], golf putting [ 26 ], driving [ 27 , 28 ] and childcare skills [ 29 ]. Given the generality of these findings, researchers have turned their efforts to elucidating the underlying mechanisms of this situational phenomenon.

Susceptibility to Stereotype Threat

Research has identified numerous moderators that make tasks more likely to elicit stereotype threat, and individuals more prone to experience it [ 30 , 31 ]. From a methodological perspective, stereotype threat effects tend to emerge on tasks of high difficulty and demand [ 32 , 33 ], however, the extent to which a task is perceived as demanding may be moderated by individual differences in working memory [ 34 ]. Additionally, stereotype threat may be more likely to occur when individuals are conscious of the stigma ascribed to their social group [ 32 , 35 ], believe the stereotypes about their group to be true [ 36 , 37 ], for those with low self-esteem [ 38 ], and an internal locus of control [ 39 ]. Research also indicates that individuals are more susceptible to stereotype threat when they identify strongly with their social group [ 40 , 41 , 42 ] and value the domain [ 10 , 13 , 15 , 33 , 43 ]. However, other research suggests that domain identification is not a prerequisite of stereotype threat effects [ 44 ] and may act as a strategy to overcome harmful academic consequences [ 45 , 46 ].

Mediators of Stereotype Threat

There has also been an exPLOSion of research into the psychological mediators of stereotype threat (c.f. [ 2 , 47 ] for reviews). In their comprehensive review, Schmader et al. [ 2 ] proposed an integrated process model, suggesting that stereotype threat heightens physiological stress responses and influences monitoring and suppression processes to deplete working memory efficiency. This provides an important contribution to the literature, signaling that multiple affective, cognitive and motivational processes may underpin the effects of stereotype threat on performance. However, the extent to which each of these variables has garnered empirical support remains unclear. Furthermore, prior research has overlooked the existence of distinct stereotype threats in the elucidation of mediating variables. Through the lens of the multi-threat framework [ 31 ], the current review distinguishes between different stereotype threat primes, which target either the self or the social group to assess the evidence base with regards to the existence of multiple stereotype threats that may be accounted for by distinct mechanisms.

A Multi-threat Approach to Mediation

Stereotype threat is typically viewed as a form of social identity threat: A situational predicament occurring when individuals perceive their social group to be devalued by others [ 48 , 49 , 50 ]. However, this notion overlooks how individuals may self-stigmatize and evaluate themselves [ 51 , 52 , 53 ] and the conflict people may experience between their personal and social identities [ 54 ]. More recently, researchers have distinguished between the role of the self and the social group in performance-evaluative situations [ 31 ]. The multi-threat framework [ 31 ] identifies six qualitatively distinct stereotype threats that manifest through the intersection of two dimensions: The target of the threat (i.e., is the stereotype applicable to one’s personal or social identity?) and the source of threat (i.e., who will judge performance; the in-group or the out-group?). Focusing on the target of the stereotype, individuals who experience a group-as-target threat may perceive that underperformance will confirm a negative societal stereotype regarding the abilities of their social group. Conversely, individuals who experience a self-as-target threat may perceive that stereotype-consistent performance will be viewed as self-characteristic [ 31 , 55 ]. Individuals may therefore experience either a self or group-based threat dependent on situational cues in the environment that heighten the contingency of a stereotyped identity [ 2 ].

Researchers also theorize that members of diverse stigmatized groups may experience different forms of stereotype threat [ 31 , 56 ], and that these distinct experiences may be mediated by somewhat different processes [ 31 , 57 ]. Indeed, there is some indirect empirical evidence to suggest that this may be the case. For example, Pavlova and colleagues [ 13 ] found that an implicit stereotype threat prime hampered women’s performance on a social cognition task. Conversely, men’s performance suffered when they were primed with an explicit gender-related stereotype. Moreover, Stone and McWhinnie [ 58 ] suggest that subtle stereotype threat cues (i.e., the gender of the experimenter) may evoke a tendency to actively monitor performance and avoid mistakes, whereas blatant stereotype threat cues (i.e., stereotype prime) create distractions that deplete working memory resources. Whilst different stereotype threat cues may simultaneously exert negative effects on performance, it is plausible that they are induced by independent mechanisms [ 58 ]. Nonetheless, insufficient evidence has prevented the multi-threat framework [ 31 ] to be evaluated empirically to date. It therefore remains to be assessed whether the same mechanisms are responsible for the effects of distinct stereotype threats on different populations and performance measures.

The current article offers the first systematic literature review aiming to: 1), identify and examine critically the proposed mediators of stereotype threat; 2), explore whether the effects of self-as-target or group-as-target stereotype threat on performance are the result of qualitatively distinct mediating mechanisms; and 3), evaluate whether different mediators govern different stereotyped populations.

Literature Search

A bibliographic search of electronic databases, such as PsycINFO, PsycARTICLES, Web of Knowledge, PubMed, Science Direct and Google Scholar was conducted between the cut-off dates of 1995 (the publication year of Steele & Aronson’s seminal article) and December 2015. A search string was developed by specifying the main terms of the phenomenon under investigation. Here, the combined key words of stereotype and threat were utilized as overarching search parameters and directly paired with either one of the following terms; mediator , mediating , mediate(s) , predictor , predicts , relationship or mechanism(s) . Additional references were retrieved by reviewing the reference lists of relevant journal articles. To control for potential publication bias [ 59 , 60 , 61 ], the lead author also enquired about any ‘in press’ articles by sending out a call for papers through the European Association for Social Psychology. The second author conducted a comparable search using the same criteria to ensure that no studies were overlooked in the original search. Identification of relevant articles and data extraction were conducted in line with the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses Statement (PRISMA; See S1 Table ) [ 62 ]. A literature search was conducted separately in each database and the records were exported to citation software, after which duplicates were removed. Relevant articles were screened by examining the title and abstract in line with the eligibility criteria. The remaining articles were assessed for eligibility by performing a full text review [ 63 , 64 ].

Eligibility Criteria.

Studies were selected based on the following criteria: 1), researchers utilized a stereotype threat manipulation; 2), a direct mediation analysis was conducted between stereotype threat and performance; 3), researchers found evidence of moderated-mediation, and 4), the full text was available in English. Articles were excluded on the following basis: 1), performance was not the dependent variable, 2), investigations of “stereotype lift”; 3), doctorate, dissertation and review articles (to avoid duplication of included articles); and 4), moderating variables. Articles that did not find any significant results in relation to stereotype threat effects were also excluded in order to capture reliable evidence of mediation [ 65 ]. See Table 1 for details of excluded articles.

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https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0146487.t001

Distinguishing Different Stereotype Threats.

The current review distinguished between different experiences of stereotype threat by examining each stereotype threat manipulation. Self-as-target threats were categorized on the basis that participants focused on the test as a measure of personal ability whereas group-as-target threats were classified on the basis that participants perceived performance to be diagnostic of their group’s ability [ 31 ].

A total of 45 studies in 38 articles were qualitatively synthesized, uncovering a total of 17 distinct proposed mediators. See Fig 1 for process of article inclusion (full details of article exclusion can be viewed in S1 Supporting Information ). These mediators were categorized into affective/subjective ( n = 6), cognitive ( n = 7) or motivational mechanisms ( n = 4). Effect sizes for mediational findings are described typically through informal descriptors, such as complete , perfect , or partial [ 66 ]. With this in mind, the current findings are reported in terms of complete or partial mediation. Complete mediation indicates that the relationship between stereotype threat ( X ) and performance ( Y ) completely disappears when a mediator ( M ) is added as a predictor variable [ 66 ]. Partial mediation refers to instances in which a significant direct effect remains between stereotype threat and performance when controlling for the mediator, suggesting that additional variables may further explain this relationship [ 67 ]. Instances of moderated mediation are also reported, which occurs when the strength of mediation is contingent on the level of a moderating variable [ 68 ]. The majority of included research utilized a group-as-target prime ( n = 36, 80%) compared to a self-as-target prime ( n = 6; 13.33%). Three studies (6.66%) were uncategorized as they employed subtle stereotype threat primes, for example, manipulating the group composition of the testing environment.

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0146487.g001

Affective/Subjective Mechanisms

Researchers have conceptualized stereotype threat frequently as a fear, apprehension or anxiety of confirming a negative stereotype about one’s group [ 3 , 69 , 70 ]. Accordingly, many affective and subjective variables such as anxiety, individuation tendencies, evaluation apprehension, performance expectations, explicit stereotype endorsement and self-efficacy have been proposed to account for the stereotype threat-performance relationship.

Steele and Aronson’s [ 3 ] original study did not find self-reported anxiety to be a significant mediator of the effects of a self-relevant stereotype on African American’s intellectual performance. Extending this work, Spencer et al. (Experiment 3, [ 11 ]) found that anxiety was not predictive of the effects that a negative group stereotype had on women’s mathematical achievement, with further research confirming this [ 14 , 44 , 71 ]. Additional studies have indicated that self-reported anxiety does not influence the impact of self-as-target stereotype elicitation on African American’s cognitive ability [ 72 ], white students’ athletic skills [ 15 ], and group-as-target stereotype threat on older adults’ memory recall [ 18 , 32 ].

Research also suggests that anxiety may account for one of multiple mediators in the stereotype threat-performance relationship. In a field study, Chung and colleagues [ 73 ] found that self-reported state anxiety and specific self-efficacy sequentially mediated the influence of stereotype threat on African American’s promotional exam performance. This finding is supported by Mrazek et al. [ 74 ] who found that anxiety and mind-wandering sequentially mediated the effects of stereotype threat on women’s mathematical ability. Laurin [ 75 ] also found that self-reported somatic anxiety partially mediated the effects of group-as-target stereotype threat on women’s motor performance. Nevertheless, it is viable to question whether this finding is comparable to other studies as stereotype threat had a facilitating effect on performance.

The mixed results regarding anxiety as a potential mediator of performance outcomes may be indicative of various boundary conditions that enhance stereotype threat susceptibility. Consistent with this claim, Gerstenberg, Imhoff and Schmitt (Experiment 3 [ 76 ]) found that women who reported a fragile math self-concept solved fewer math problems under group-as-target stereotype threat and this susceptibility was mediated by increased anxiety. This moderated-mediation suggests that women with a low academic self-concept may be more vulnerable to stereotype threat, with anxiety underpinning its effect on mathematical performance.

Given that anxiety may be relatively difficult to detect via self-report measures [ 3 , 29 ], researchers have utilized indirect measures. For instance, Bosson et al. [ 29 ] found that physiological anxiety mediated the effects of stereotype threat on homosexual males’ performance on an interpersonal task. Nevertheless, this effect has not been replicated for the effects of group-as-target stereotype threat on older adults’ memory recall [ 32 ] and self-as-target threat on children’s writing ability [ 77 ].

Individuation tendencies.

Steele and Aronson [ 3 ] proposed that stereotype threat might occur when individuals perceive a negative societal stereotype to be a true representation of personal ability. Based on this, Keller and Sekaquaptewa [ 78 ] examined whether gender-related threats (i.e., group-as-target threat) influenced women to individuate their personal identity (the self) from their social identity (female). Results revealed that participants underperformed on a spatial ability test when they perceived that they were a single in-group representative (female) in a group of males. Moreover, stereotype threat was partially mediated by ‘individuation tendencies’ in that gender-based threats influenced women to disassociate their self from the group to lessen the applicability of the stereotype. The authors suggest that this increased level of self-focused attention under solo status conditions is likely related to increased levels of anxiety.

Evaluation apprehension.

Steele and Aronson [ 3 ] also suggested that individuals might apprehend that they will confirm a negative stereotype in the eyes of out-group members. Despite this, Mayer and Hanges [ 72 ] found that evaluation apprehension did not mediate the effects of a self-as-target stereotype threat on African American’s cognitive ability. Additional studies also indicate that evaluation apprehension does not mediate the effects of group-as-target stereotype threat on women’s mathematical performance [ 11 , 79 ].

Performance expectations.

Under stereotype threat, individuals may evaluate the subjective likelihood of success depending on their personal resources. As these personal resources are typically anchored to group-level expectations, in-group threatening information (i.e., women are poor at math) may reduce personal expectancies to achieve and diminish performance [ 80 ]. Testing this prediction, Cadinu et al. (Experiment 1 [ 80 ]) found that women solved fewer math problems when they were primed with a negative group-based stereotype relative to those who received a positive or no stereotype. Furthermore, performance expectancies partially mediated the effect of group-as-target threat on math performance, revealing that negative information was associated with lower expectancies. A second experiment indicated further that performance expectancies partially mediated the effects of group-as-target threat on Black participants’ verbal ability. Research by Rosenthal, Crisp and Mein-Woei (Experiment 2 [ 81 ]) also found that performance expectancies partially mediated the effects of self-based stereotypes on women’s mathematical performance. However, rather than decreasing performance expectancies, women under stereotype threat reported higher predictions for performance relative to a control condition.

Research has extended this work to examine the role of performance expectancies in diverse stigmatized populations. For example, Hess et al. [ 32 ] found evidence of moderated-mediation for the effects of a group-as-target stereotype threat on older adults’ memory recall. Here, the degree to which performance expectancies mediated stereotype threat effects was moderated by participants’ education. That is, elderly individuals with higher levels of education showed greater susceptibility to stereotype threat. These findings add weight to the assertion that lowered performance expectations may account for the effects of stereotype threat on performance, especially among individuals who identify strongly with the ability domain. Conversely, Appel et al. [ 43 ] found that performance expectancies do not mediate the effects of group-based stereotype threat among highly identified women in the domains of science, technology, engineering and mathematics.

Further research suggests that stereotype threat can be activated through subtle cues in the environment rather than explicit stereotype activation [ 58 , 82 ]. It is therefore plausible that expectancies regarding performance may be further undermined when stigmatized in-group members are required to perform a stereotype-relevant task in front of out-group members. Advancing this suggestion, Sekaquaptewa and Thompson [ 82 ] examined the interactive effects of solo status and stereotype threat on women’s mathematical performance. Results revealed that women underperformed when they completed a quantitative examination in the presence of men (solo status) and under stereotype threat. However, whilst performance expectancies partially mediated the relationship between group composition and mathematical ability, they did not mediate the effects of stereotype threat on performance.

Explicit stereotype endorsement.

Research has examined whether targeted individuals’ personal endorsement of negative stereotypes is associated with underperformance. For example, Leyens and colleagues [ 83 ] found that men underperformed on an affective task when they were told that they were not as apt as women in processing affective information. Against predictions, however, stereotype endorsement was not found to be a significant intermediary between stereotype threat and performance. Other studies also indicate that stereotype endorsement is not an underlying mechanism of the effects of self-as-target [ 3 ] and group-as-target stereotype threat on women’s mathematical aptitude [ 11 , 84 ].

Self-efficacy.

Research suggests that self-efficacy can have a significant impact on an individual’s motivation and performance [ 85 , 86 , 87 ], and may be influenced by environmental cues [ 88 ]. Accordingly, it has been proposed that the situational salience of a negative stereotype may reduce an individual’s self-efficacy. As mentioned, Chung et al. [ 73 ] found that state anxiety and specific self-efficacy accounted for deficits in African American’s performance on a job promotion exam. However, additional studies indicate that self-efficacy does not mediate the effects of self-as-target threat on African American’s cognitive ability [ 72 ] and group-as-target threat on women’s mathematical performance [ 11 ].

Cognitive Mechanisms

Much research has proposed that affective and subjective variables underpin the harmful effects that stereotype threat exerts on performance [ 89 ]. However, other research posits that stereotype threat may influence performance detriments through its demands on cognitive processes [ 2 , 89 , 90 ]. Specifically, researchers have examined whether stereotype threat is mediated by; working memory, cognitive load, thought suppression, mind-wandering, negative thinking, cognitive appraisals and implicit stereotype endorsement.

Working memory.

Schmader and Johns [ 89 ] proposed that performance-evaluative situations might reduce working memory capacity as stereotype-related thoughts consume cognitive resources. In three studies, they examined whether working memory accounted for the influence of a group-as-target threat on women’s and Latino American’s mathematical ability. Findings indicated that both female and Latino American participants solved fewer mathematical problems compared to participants in a non-threat control condition. Furthermore, reduced working memory capacity, measured via an operation span task [ 91 ], mediated the deleterious effects of stereotype threat on math performance. Supporting this, Rydell et al. (Experiment 3 [ 92 ]) found that working memory mediated the effects of a group-relevant stereotype on women’s mathematical performance when they perceived their performance to be evaluated in line with their gender identity. Here results also showed that these performance decrements were eliminated when women were concurrently primed with a positive and negative social identity (Experiment 2).

Further research has also examined how stereotype threat may simultaneously operate through cognitive and emotional processes. Across four experiments, Johns et al. [ 90 ] found that stereotype threat was accountable for deficits in women’s verbal, intellectual and mathematical ability. Moreover, emotion regulation − characterized as response-focused coping − mediated the effects of group-as-target stereotype threat on performance by depleting executive resources.

Nonetheless, executive functioning is made up of more cognitive processes than the construct of working memory [ 93 ]. Acknowledging this, Rydell et al. [ 93 ] predicted that updating (i.e., the ability to maintain and update information in the face of interference) would mediate stereotype threat effects. They further hypothesized that inhibition (i.e., the ability to inhibit a dominant response) and shifting (i.e., people’s ability to switch between tasks) should not underpin this effect. Results indicated that women who experienced an explicit group-as-target threat displayed reduced mathematical performance compared to a control condition. Consistent with predictions, only updating mediated the stereotype threat-performance relationship. These results suggest that the verbal ruminations associated with a negative stereotype may interfere with women’s ability to maintain and update the calculations needed to solve difficult math problems.

The extent to which updating accounts for stereotype threat effects in diverse populations, however, is less straightforward. For example, Hess et al. [ 32 ] found that working memory, measured by a computational span task, did not predict the relationship between group-based stereotype threat and older participants’ memory performance.

Cognitive load.

There is ample evidence to suggest that stereotype threat depletes performance by placing higher demands on mental resources [ 89 , 93 ]. These demands may exert additional peripheral activity (i.e., emotional regulation) that can further interfere with task performance [ 90 ]. In order to provide additional support for this notion, Croizet et al. [ 94 ] examined whether increased mental load, measured by participants’ heart rate, mediated the effects of stereotype threat on Psychology majors’ cognitive ability. Here, Psychology majors were primed that they had lower intelligence compared to Science majors. Results indicated that this group-as-target stereotype threat undermined Psychology majors’ cognitive ability by triggering a psychophysiological mental load. Moreover, this increased mental load mediated the effects of stereotype threat on cognitive performance.

Thought suppression.

Research suggests that individuals who experience stereotype threat may be aware that their performance will be evaluated in terms of a negative stereotype and, resultantly, engage in efforts to disprove it [ 3 , 94 , 95 ]. This combination of awareness and avoidance may lead to attempts to suppress negative thoughts that consequently tax the cognitive resources needed to perform effectively. In four experiments, Logel et al. (Experiment 2 [ 95 ]) examined whether stereotype threat influences stereotypical thought suppression by counterbalancing whether participants completed a stereotype-relevant lexical decision task before or after a mathematical test. Results indicated that women underperformed on the test in comparison to men. Interestingly, women tended to suppress stereotypical words when the lexical decision task was administered before the math test, but showed post-suppression rebound of stereotype-relevant words when this task was completed afterwards. Mediational analyses revealed that only pre-test thought suppression partially mediated the effects of stereotype threat on performance.

Mind-wandering.

Previous research suggests that the anticipation of a stereotype-laden test may produce a greater proportion of task-related thoughts and worries [ 93 , 95 ]. Less research has examined the role of thoughts unrelated to the task in hand as a potential mediator of stereotype threat effects. Directly testing this notion, Mrazek et al. (Experiment 2 [ 74 ]) found that a group-as-target stereotype threat hampered women’s mathematical performance in comparison to a control condition. Furthermore, although self-report measures of mind-wandering resulted in null findings, indirect measures revealed that women under stereotype threat showed a marked decrease in attention. Mediation analyses indicated further that stereotype threat heightened anxiety which, in turn, increased mind-wandering and contributed to the observed impairments in math performance. Despite these findings, other studies have found no indication that task irrelevant thoughts mediate the effects of group-as-target stereotype threat on women’s mathematical performance [ 24 ] and African American participants’ cognitive ability [ 72 ].

Negative thinking.

Schmader and Johns’ [ 89 ] research suggests that the performance deficits observed under stereotype threat may be influenced by intrusive thoughts. Further research [ 74 ] has included post-experimental measures of cognitive interference to assess the activation of distracting thoughts under stereotype threat. However, the content of these measures are predetermined by the experimenter and do not allow participants to report spontaneously on their experiences under stereotype threat. Overcoming these issues, Cadinu and colleagues [ 96 ] asked women to list their current thoughts whilst taking a difficult math test under conditions of stereotype threat. Results revealed that female participants underperformed when they perceived a mathematical test to be diagnostic of gender differences. Moreover, participants in the stereotype threat condition listed more negative thoughts relative to those in the control condition, with intrusive thoughts mediating the relationship between stereotype threat and poor math performance. It seems therefore that negative performance-related thoughts may consume working memory resources to impede performance.

Cognitive appraisal.

Other research suggests that individuals may engage in coping strategies to offset the performance implications of a negative stereotype. One indicator of coping is cognitive appraisal, whereby individuals evaluate the significance of a situation as well as their ability to control it [ 97 ]. Here, individuals may exert more effort on a task when the situational presents as a challenge, but may disengage from the task if they evaluate the situation as a threat [ 98 , 99 ]. Taking this into consideration, Berjot, Roland-Levy and Girault-Lidvan [ 100 ] proposed that targeted members might be more likely to perceive a negative stereotype as a threat to their group identity rather than as a challenge to disprove it. They found that North African secondary school students underperformed on a visuospatial task when they perceived French students to possess superior perceptual-motor skills. Contrary to predictions, threat appraisal did not mediate the relation between stereotype threat and performance. Rather, perceiving the situation as a challenge significantly mediated the stereotype threat-performance relationship. Specifically, participants who appraised stereotype threat as a challenge performed better than those who did not. These results therefore suggest that individuals may strive to confront, rather than avoid, intellectual challenges and modify the stereotype held by members of a relevant out-group in a favorable direction [ 101 ].

Implicit stereotype endorsement.

Situational cues that present as a threat may increase the activation of automatic associations between a stereotyped concept (i.e., female), negative attributes (i.e., bad), and the performance domain (i.e., math; [ 102 ]). Implicit measures may be able to detect recently formed automatic associations between concepts and stereotypical attributes that are not yet available to explicitly self-report [ 103 ]. In a study of 240 six-year old children, Galdi et al. [ 103 ] examined whether implicit stereotype threat endorsement accounted for the effects of stereotype threat on girls’ mathematical performance. Consistent with the notion that automatic associations can precede conscious beliefs, results indicated that girls acquire implicit math-gender stereotypes before they emerge at an explicit level. Specifically, girls showed stereotype-consistent automatic associations between the terms ‘boy-mathematics’ and ‘girl-language’, which mediated stereotype threat effects.

Motivational Mechanisms

Most of the initial work on the underlying mechanisms of stereotype threat has focused on affective and cognitive processes. More recently, research has begun to examine whether individuals may be motivated to disconfirm a negative stereotype, with this having a paradoxical effect of harming performance [ 104 , 105 , 106 ]. To this end, research has elucidated the potential role of effort, self-handicapping, dejection, vigilance, and achievement goals.

Effort/motivation.

Underpinned by the “mere effort model” [ 104 ], Jamieson and Harkins [ 105 ] examined whether motivation plays a proximal role in the effect of stereotype threat on women’s math performance. Here they predicted that stereotype threat would lead participants to use a conventional problem solving approach (i.e., use known equations to compute an answer), which would facilitate performance on ‘solve’ problems, but hamper performance on ‘comparison’ problems. Results supported this hypothesis, indicating that stereotype threat debilitated performance on comparison problems as participants employed the dominant, but incorrect, solution approach. Furthermore, this incorrect solving approach mediated the effect of stereotype threat on comparison problem performance. This suggests that stereotype threat motivates participants to perform well, which increases activation of a dominant response to the task. However, as this dominant approach does not always guarantee success, the work indicates that different problem solving strategies may determine whether a person underperforms on a given task [ 105 , 107 ].

Stereotype threat may have differential effects on effort dependent on the prime utilized [ 27 ]. For example, Skorich et al. [ 27 ] examined whether effort mediated the effects of implicit and explicit stereotypes on provisional drivers’ performance on a hazard perception test. Participants in the implicit prime condition ticked their driving status (provisional, licensed) on a questionnaire, whereas participants in the explicit prime condition were provided with stereotypes relating to the driving ability of provisional licensees. Results revealed that participants detected more hazards when they were primed with an explicit stereotype relative to an implicit stereotype. Mediational analyses showed that whilst increased effort mediated the effects of an implicit stereotype on performance, decreased effort mediated the effects of an explicit stereotype prime. Research also indicates that reduced effort mediates the effects of an explicit stereotype on older adults’ memory recall [ 18 ]. Taken together, these results suggest that implicit stereotype primes may lead to increased effort as participants aim to disprove the stereotype, whereas explicit stereotype threat primes may lead to decreased effort as participants self-handicap [ 27 ]. Nevertheless, other studies utilizing self-reported measures of effort have resulted in non-significant findings (Experiment 1 & 2 [ 14 ]; Experiment 4 [ 44 ]; Experiment 2 [ 77 ]; Experiment 2, 4 & 5, [ 108 ]).

Self-handicapping.

Individuals may engage in self-handicapping strategies to proactively reduce the applicability of a negative stereotype to their performance. Here, people attempt to influence attributions for performance by erecting barriers to their success. Investigating this notion, Stone [ 15 ] examined whether self-handicapping mediated the effects of stereotype threat on white athletes’ sporting performance. Self-handicapping was measured by the total amount of stereotype-relevant words completed on a word-fragment task. Results indicated that white athletes practiced less when they perceived their ability on a golf-putting task to be diagnostic of personal ability, thereby confirming a negative stereotype relating to ‘poor white athleticism’. Moreover, these athletes were more likely to complete the term ‘awkward’ on a word fragment completion test compared to the control condition. Mediation analyses revealed that the greater accessibility of the term ‘awkward’ partially mediated the effects of stereotype threat on psychological disengagement and performance. The authors suggest that stereotype threat increased the accessibility of thoughts related to poor athleticism to inhibit athletes' practice efforts. However, a limitation of this research is that analyses were based on single-item measures (i.e., the completion of the word ‘awkward’) rather than total of completed words on the word-fragment test.

Keller [ 109 ] also tested the hypothesis that the salience of a negative stereotype is related to self-handicapping tendencies. Results showed that women who were primed with a group-as-target stereotype underperformed on a mathematical test relative to their control group counterparts. Furthermore, they expressed stronger tendencies to search for external explanations for their weak performance with this mediating the effects of stereotype threat on performance. Despite these preliminary findings, Keller and Dauenheimer [ 44 ] were unable to provide support for the notion that self-reported self-handicapping is a significant intermediary between stereotype threat and women’s mathematical underperformance.

Research on performance expectations suggests that stereotype threat effects may be mediated by goals set by the participants. Extending this work, Keller and Dauenheimer [ 44 ] hypothesized that female participants may make more errors on a mathematical test due to an overly motivated approach strategy. Results indicated that women underperformed when a math test was framed as diagnostic of gender differences (a group-as-target threat). Furthermore, their experiences of dejection were found to mediate the relation between stereotype threat and performance. The authors suggest that individuals may be motivated to disconfirm the negative stereotype and thus engage in a promotion focus of self-regulation. However, feelings of failure may elicit an emotional response that resultantly determines underperformance.

In contrast to Keller and Dauenheimer [ 44 ], Seibt and Förster (Experiment 5; [ 108 ]) proposed that under stereotype threat, targeted individuals engage in avoidance and vigilance strategies. They predicted that positive stereotypes should induce a promotion focus, leading to explorative and creative processing, whereas negative stereotypes should induce a prevention focus state of vigilance, with participants avoiding errors. Across five experiments, male and female participants were primed with a group-as-target stereotype suggesting that women have better verbal abilities than men. However, rather than showing a stereotype threat effect, results indicated a speed-accuracy trade off with male participants completing an analytical task slower but more accurately than their counterparts in a non-threat control condition. Furthermore, this prevention focus of vigilance was found to partially mediate the effects of stereotype threat on men’s analytical abilities (Experiment 5). The authors conclude that the salience of a negative group stereotype elicits a vigilant, risk-averse processing style that diminishes creativity and speed while bolstering analytic thinking and accuracy.

Achievement goals.

Achievement goals theory [ 110 ] posits that participants will evaluate their role in a particular achievement context and endorse either performance-focused or performance-avoidance goals. In situations where the chances of success are low, individuals engage in performance-avoidance goals, corresponding to a desire to avoid confirming a negative stereotype. Accordingly, Chalabaev et al. [ 111 ] examined whether performance avoidance goals mediated the effects of stereotype threat on women’s sporting performance. Here, the impact of two self-as-target stereotypes (i.e., poor athletic and soccer ability) on performance were assessed relative to a control condition. Results indicated that women in the athletic ability condition performed more poorly on a dribbling task, but not in the soccer ability condition. Furthermore, although these participants endorsed a performance-avoidance goal, this did not mediate the relationship between stereotype threat and soccer performance.

Highlighting the possible interplay between affective, cognitive and motivation mechanisms, Brodish and Devine [ 112 ] proffered a multi-mediator model, proposing that anxiety and performance-avoidance goals may mediate the effects of group-as-target stereotype threat on women’s mathematical performance. Achievement goals were measured by whether participants endorsed performance-avoidant (the desire to avoid performing poorly) or approach goals (trying to outperform others). Results indicated that women under stereotype threat solved fewer mathematical problems relative to those in a control condition. Mediation analyses revealed that performance avoidance goals and anxiety sequentially mediated women’s mathematical performance. That is, stereotype threatened women were motivated to avoid failure, which in turn heightened anxiety and influenced underperformance. Table 2 summarizes the articles reviewed and details their key findings and respective methodologies. See S2 Table for overview of significant mediational findings.

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0146487.t002

The current review evaluated empirical support for the mediators of stereotype threat. Capitalizing on the multi-threat framework [ 31 ], we distinguished between self-relevant and group-relevant stereotype threats to examine the extent to which these are mediated by qualitatively distinct mechanisms and imperil diverse stigmatized populations. On the whole, the results of the current review indicate that experiences of stereotype threat may increase individuals’ feelings of anxiety, negative thinking and mind-wandering which deplete the working memory resources required for successful task execution. Research documents further that individuals may be motivated to disconfirm the negative stereotype and engage in efforts to suppress stereotypical thoughts that are inconsistent with task goals. However, many of the mediators tested have resulted in varying degrees of empirical support. Below we suggest that stereotype threat may operate in distinct ways dependent on the population under study, the primes utilized, and the instruments used to measure mediation and performance.

Previous research has largely conceptualized stereotype threat as a singular construct, experienced similarly by individuals and groups across situations [ 31 , 55 ]. Consequently, research has overlooked the possibility of multiple forms of stereotype threats that may be implicated through concerns to an individual’s personal or social identity [ 31 ]. This is highlighted in the present review, as the majority of stereotype threat studies employed a group-as-target prime. Here stereotype threat is typically instantiated to highlight that stereotype-consistent performance may confirm, or reinforce, a negative societal stereotype as being a true representation of one’s social group [ 48 ]. This has led to a relative neglect of situations in which individuals may anticipate that their performance may be indicative of personal ability [ 31 , 55 ].

Similar processes such as arousal, deficits in working memory, and motivation may be triggered by self-as-target and group-as-target stereotype threats. However, it is important to note that the experiences of these stereotype threats may be fundamentally distinct [ 31 ]. That is, deficits in working memory under self-as-target stereotype threat may be evoked by negative thoughts relating to the self (i.e., ruining one’s opportunities, letting oneself down). Conversely, group-based intrusive thoughts may mediate the effects of group-as-target threat on performance as individuals view their performance in line with their social group (i.e., confirming a societal stereotype, letting the group down) [ 31 ]. Moreover, research suggests that when a group-based stereotype threat is primed, individuals dissociate their sense of self from the negatively stereotyped domain [ 78 ]. Yet, this may be more unlikely when an individual experiences self-as-target stereotype threat as their personal ability is explicitly tied to a negative stereotype that governs their ingroup. As such, the activation of a group-based stereotype may set in motion mechanisms that reflect a protective orientation of self-regulation, whereas self-relevant knowledge may heighten self-consciousness. To date, however, research has not explicitly distinguished between self-as-target and group-as-target stereotype threat in the elucidation of mediating variables. Future research would therefore benefit from a systematic investigation of how different stereotype threats may hamper performance in qualitatively distinguishable ways. One way to investigate the hypotheses set out here would be to allow participants to spontaneously report their experiences under self-as-target and group-as-target stereotype threat, and to examine differences in the content of participants’ thoughts as a function of these different primes.

In a similar vein, different mechanisms may mediate the effects of blatant and subtle stereotype threat effects on performance [ 27 , 58 , 111 ]. Blatant threat manipulations explicitly inform participants of a negative stereotype related to performance (e.g., [ 3 , 11 ]), whereas placing stigmatized group members in a situation in which they have minority status may evoke more subtle stereotype threat [ 78 , 82 ]. Providing evidence consistent with this notion, Sekaquaptewa and Thompson [ 82 ] found that performance expectancies partially mediated the effects of solo status, but not stereotype threat on performance. These results suggest that women may make comparative judgments about their expected performance when they are required to undertake an exam in the presence of out-group members, yet may not consciously recognize how a negative stereotype can directly impair performance. Further research suggests that working memory may mediate the effects of subtle stereotype threat cues on performance as individuals attend to situational cues that heighten the salience of a discredited identity [ 88 , 94 ]. Alternatively, motivation may mediate the effects of blatant stereotype threat as individuals strive to disprove the negative stereotype [ 27 , 44 , 58 , 108 ]. Although stereotype threat effects appear to be robust [ 30 ], it is plausible that these distinct manipulations diverge in the nature, the focus, and the intensity of threat they produce and may therefore be mediated by different mechanisms [ 31 ].

It is also conceivable that different groups are more susceptible to certain types of stereotype threat [ 13 , 31 , 56 ]. For example, research indicates that women’s performance on a social cognition task was influenced to a greater extent by implicit gender-related stereotypes, whereas men were more vulnerable to explicit stereotype threat [ 13 ]. Further research suggests that populations who tend to have low group identification (e.g., those with a mental illness or obesity) are more susceptible to self-as-target threats. Conversely, populations with high group identification, such as individuals of a certain ethnicity, gender or religion are more likely to experience group-as-target threats [ 56 ]. Whilst this highlights the role of moderating variables that heighten individuals’ susceptibility to stereotype threat, it also suggests that individuals may experience stereotype threat in different ways, dependent on their stigmatized identity. This may explain why some variables (e.g., anxiety, self-handicapping) that have been found to mediate the effects of stereotype threat on some groups have not emerged in other populations.

Finally, it is conceivable that diverse mediators account for the effects of stereotype threat on different performance outcomes. For example, although working memory is implicated in tasks that typically require controlled processing, it is not required for tasks that rely more on automatic processes [ 24 , 58 , 93 ]. In line with this notion, Beilock et al. [ 24 ] found that experts’ golf putting skills were harmed under stereotype threat when attention was allocated to automatic processes that operate usually outside of working memory. This suggests that well-learned skills may be hampered by attempts to bring performance back under step-by-step control. Conversely, skills such as difficult math problem solving appear to involve heavy processing demands and may be harmed when working memory is consumed by a negative stereotype. As such, distinct mechanisms may underpin different threat-related performance outcomes.

Limitations of Stereotype Threat Research

We now outline methodological issues in current stereotype threat literature with a view to inform the design of future research. First, researchers have predominantly utilized self-report measures in their efforts to uncover the mediating variables of stereotype threat. However, it has long been argued that individuals have limited access to higher order mental processes [ 113 , 114 ], such as those involved in the evaluation and initiation of behavior [ 115 , 116 ]. Resultantly, participants under stereotype threat may be unable to observe and explicitly report the operations of their own mind [ 29 , 114 , 117 , 118 , 119 ]. Consistent with this assertion, Bosson et al. [ 29 ] found that although stereotype threat heightened individuals’ physiological anxiety, the same individuals did not report an awareness of increased anxiety on self-report measures. Participants may thus be mindful of the impression they make on others and engage in self-presentational behaviors in an effort to appear invulnerable to negative stereotypes [ 29 ]. This is supported by research suggesting that stereotype threatened participants tend not to explicitly endorse stereotypes [ 29 , 37 , 83 , 84 ] and are more likely to claim impediments to justify poor performance [ 3 , 14 , 109 ]. Moreover, it is possible that stereotype threat processes are non-conscious [ 119 ] with research indicating that implicit–but not explicit–stereotype endorsement mediates stereotype threat effects [ 103 ]. This suggests that non-conscious processing of stereotype-relevant information may influence the decrements observed in individuals’ performance under stereotype threat. Furthermore, this research underscores the greater sensitivity of indirect measures for examining the mediators of stereotype threat. From this perspective, future research may benefit from the use of physiological measures, such as heart rate, cortisol and skin conductance to examine anxiety (c.f., [ 94 , 120 , 121 ]), the IAT to measure implicit stereotype endorsement [ 103 ] and the sustained response to attention task to measure mind-wandering [ 74 ].

In the investigation of stereotype threat, self-report measures may be particularly susceptible to order effects. For example, Brodish and Devine [ 112 ] found that women reported higher levels of anxiety when they completed a questionnaire before a mathematical test compared to afterwards. This suggests that pre-test anxiety ratings may have reflected participants’ uneasiness towards the upcoming evaluative test, with this apprehension diminishing once the test was completed. Research by Logel and colleagues [ 95 ] provides support for this notion, indicating that women who completed a lexical decision task after a math test were quicker to respond to stereotype-relevant words compared to women who subsequently completed the task. These results exhibit the variability in individuals’ emotions under stereotype threat and suggest that they may be unable to retrospectively report on their feelings once the threat has passed. This emphasizes the importance of counterbalancing test instruments in the investigation of stereotype threat, purporting that the order in which test materials are administered may influence mediational findings.

This review highlights that, in some studies, individuals assigned to a control condition may have also experienced stereotype threat, thus potentially preventing reliable evidence of mediation. For instance, Chalabaev et al. [ 111 ] primed stereotype threat by presenting a soccer ability test as a diagnostic indicator of personal factors related to athletic ability. Nevertheless, participants in the control condition received information that the aim of the test was to examine psychological factors in athletic ability. Consequently, these participants may have also been apprehensive about their performance being evaluated, and this may have precluded evidence that achievement goals mediate the stereotype threat-performance relationship. Furthermore, research has manipulated the salience of stereotype threat by stating that gender differences in math performance are equal [ 82 ]. However, other research has utilized this prime within control conditions (e.g., [ 94 , 105 , 119 ]), underpinned by the rationale that describing a test as ‘fair’ or non-diagnostic of ability eliminates stereotype threat [ 122 ]. It is therefore possible that, in some instances, researchers have inadvertently induced stereotype threat. This outlines the importance of employing a control condition in which individuals are not made aware of any negative stereotypes, and are told that the test is non-diagnostic of ability, in order to detect possible mediators.

Two decades of research have demonstrated the harmful effects that stereotype threat can exert on a wide range of populations in a broad array of performance domains. However, findings with regards to the mediators that underpin these effects are equivocal. This may be a consequence of the heterogeneity of primes used to instantiate stereotype threat and the methods used to measure mediation and performance. To this end, future work is likely to benefit from the following directions: First, account for the existence of multiple stereotype threats; Second, recognize that the experiences of stereotype threat may differ between stigmatized groups, and that no one mediator may provide generalized empirical support across diverse populations; Third, utilize indirect measures, in addition to self-report measures, to examine reliably mediating variables and to examine further the convergence of these two methods; Fourth, counterbalance test instruments to control for order effects; and finally, ensure that participants in a control condition do not inadvertently encounter stereotype threat by stating explicitly that the task is non-diagnostic of ability.

Supporting Information

S1 supporting information. list of excluded studies and rationale for exclusion..

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0146487.s001

S1 Table. PRISMA Checklist.

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0146487.s002

S2 Table. Summary of affective, cognitive and motivational mechanisms that have been found to mediate stereotype threat effects.

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0146487.s003

Author Contributions

Analyzed the data: CRP DH. Contributed reagents/materials/analysis tools: CRP DH ARL DTL. Wrote the paper: CRP. Developed the review design and protocol: CRP DH AL DL. Reviewed the manuscript: DH AL DL. Cross-checked articles in systematic review: CRP DH.

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• Published: 25 November 2020

Perceptions of stereotypes applied to women who publicly communicate their STEM work

• Merryn McKinnon   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0003-4808-0380 1   na1 &
• Christine O’Connell 2   na1  

Humanities and Social Sciences Communications volume  7 , Article number:  160 ( 2020 ) Cite this article

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Gender biases and stereotypes are prevalent in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) fields, which can create obstacles for the attraction, retention and progression of girls and women to STEM studies and careers. There are many initiatives which are used to attempt to address these biases and stereotypes, including the use of visible role models. This study explores the perceptions of the stereotypes applied to female STEM professionals who publicly speak about their work in both academic and non-academic settings. Using workshops with over 300 participants, predominantly female STEM professionals, from over 25 different cultural backgrounds, the results showed women who publicly communicate their work are likely to be stereotyped as ‘bitchy’, ‘bossy’, and ‘emotional’—often by their own gender. These findings suggest that women may be in a more vulnerable position when communicating publicly about their work, which could have implications for them participating fully in their careers. It may also have implications for programs which use role models to address prevailing STEM stereotypes. Systematic cultural and institutional change is needed in STEM fields to address the underlying bias and negative stereotypes facing women. However, it should be ensured that the intended solutions to facilitate this change are not compounding the problem.

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Introduction

Gender gaps and bias are still prevalent in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) fields. Gender-based stereotypes present obstacles for women in STEM and continue to play a role in ongoing discrimination and under-representation of women in STEM professions (Carli et al., 2016 ). Experiences with gender bias and stereotypes in STEM are compounded throughout female scientist’s careers and have been shown to emerge as early as kindergarten (Bian et al., 2017 ; Cimpian et al., 2016 ). One dominant stereotype is that boys are better at maths and science than girls, which studies show is not true (O’Dea et al., 2018 ). In addition, stereotypical traits of scientists such as objectivity and rationality are generally consistent with male gender-normative traits (Settles et al., 2016 ). Comparatively, women are seen as highly communal (i.e., kinder, warmer, empathetic) and less agentic (i.e., analytical, independant, and competitive) and therefore less likely to have the qualities and personality characteristics needed to be successful scientists (Carli et al., 2016 ). Gender based stereotypes like this not only influence the career choices for women in STEM, but also the retention of women in STEM fields as they must overcome deeply embedded discrimination and bias (Ellemers, 2018 ; Carli et al., 2016 ).

These gendered STEM stereotypes are inherently influenced by the dominant social norms that position STEM as being male-oriented (Garriott et al., 2017 ), including in media coverage of science and technology (Women’s Leadership Institute Australia, 2019 ). Public perceptions of science are shaped by exposure to science and role models, and the cultural contexts and beliefs of the individuals who are exposed (Noy and O’Brien, 2019 ). Role models can be used to address negative stereotypical perceptions of women in STEM fields, as well as both attract and retain girls and women in STEM studies and careers (Drury et al., 2011 ; Shin et al., 2016 ). However what are the implications of being a visible woman in STEM? This study aims to provide insight into the perceptions of the stereotypes which are applied to women who speak publicly about their research and/or work. The implications of these stereotypes for women in STEM, particularly those who may be considered role models, are then discussed.

Literature review

Gender stereotypes are shared by all and tend to oversimplify reality, creating judgments of people based on perceived—rather than actual—ability (Ellemers, 2018 ). Women are stereotypically defined as having communal traits such as being warm and nurturing, whereas men are stereotypically allocated agentic traits such as competence and assertiveness (Fiske et al., 2002 ) with the latter considered much more consistent with competitive STEM fields (Settles et al., 2016 ). If a group is negatively stereotyped (e.g., seen as somehow lesser), membership of this group can influence psychological health (Roberts et al., 2008 ), performance (Steele, 1997 ) and one’s sense of identity and belonging (Diekman et al., 2019 ). This is especially the case if the role models have high levels of stigma consciousness; an expectation of judgment because of a specific group membership, irrespective of behavior or performance (Pinel, 1999 ). Stigma consciousness may be an important indicator of vulnerability of women to the negative influence of stereotype threat in real world contexts (Cadaret et al., 2017 ).

Awareness of being negatively perceived or ‘other’ can influence identity, either identity as a particular gender or as someone who does science (Carlone and Johnson, 2007 ). Earlier studies have also found that members of marginalized groups may further penalize those who display these marginalized identity traits (Opie and Phillips, 2015 ). Therefore, members of marginalized groups may be reluctant to display the traits which identify them as a member of that group, negating attempts to increase workplace diversity and inclusion (Opie and Phillips, 2015 ). For example, studies have found that women in academia are evaluated more on personality then ability, compared to male colleagues, and are expected to be more nurturing and empathetic (Heilman and Okimoto, 2007 ; Mitchell and Martin, 2018 ). Not only do these stereotypes have implications for women’s careers if they do not conform to being ‘warm’, but as a marginalized group, they may penalize other women who display this stereotype (Opie and Phillips, 2015 ). In addition, accomplishments that challenge the stereotype (e.g., women being good at science) are often discounted or attributed to outside help (Ellemers, 2018 ).

Stereotypes lead people to treat men and women differently, hold them to different standards, and perpetuate gender bias in society, including in STEM (Ellemers, 2018 ). These perceptions and evaluations are underpinned by both explicit and implicit biases, with the latter more automatic and less conscious and controllable than the former (Charlesworth and Banaji, 2019 ). Previous studies have shown that even women working within science hold an implicit stereotype of science being a masculine area and women ‘belonging’ in the arts (Smyth and Nosek, 2015 ). Implicit biases which reinforce gender stereotypes have been found to become evident from a young age and appear across genders, cultures and time (Charlesworth and Banaji, 2019 ).

Gender stereotypes negatively influence a women’s perceived potential, and also how they are evaluated (Ellemers, 2018 ) including in job materials like reference letters and resumes (Milkman et al., 2015 ; Moss-Racusin et al., 2012 ). In teaching evaluations specifically, women experienced a negative bias in ratings and were evaluated on different criteria than men, including appearance and personality (Mitchell and Martin, 2018 ). Articles are cited less when key authors are female, and research has shown an underrepresentation of female authorships in prestigious journals (Bendels et al., 2018 ). Despite this body of research, there are some men—and probably some women—in STEM faculties who are reluctant to accept research and evidence of gender bias in STEM (Handley et al., 2015 ). However, gender biases can all have serious and lasting impacts on the person targeted and the cumulative effects can be extremely damaging to both their career and self (Knobloch-Westerwick et al., 2013 ; National Academies of Sciences, 2018 ). Women who publicly communicate their work may be especially vulnerable to these different types of harassment. Gender-based stereotypes can amplify harrassment and discrimination in STEM, especially when those stereotypes about women do not overlap with those about perceptions of what it means to be a scientist (Carli et al., 2016 ).

Gender bias and sexism are pervasive and well documented in STEM fields, disproportionately disrupting and impacting women (National Academies of Sciences, 2018 ; Rosenthal et al., 2016 ) especially women of color (Clancy et al., 2017 ) and LGBTQ+ and non-binary individuals (Konik and Cortina, 2008 ). The most common type of harassment in STEM fields is gender harassment (National Academies of Sciences, 2018 ), which can involve disrespectful actions, put downs and negative comments that convey the false narrative that women are lesser than their male counterparts (National Academies of Sciences, 2018 ; Weitz, 2018 ). In disciplines like engineering, they can suffer from (in)visibility where they are highly visible as a woman but their abilities as engineers are contested (Faulkner, 2009 ). Then there are Queen Bees, even in non-STEM fields; women who have risen to leadership positions in male dominated organizations and then distance themselves from junior women, agree with negative stereotypes and effectively reinforce gender inequality (Derks et al., 2016 ).

The negative effects of gender-based stereotypes extend to public communication activities of women in STEM. Media worldwide have traditionally under-represented females in STEM, and where they were represented the focus tended to be either on their appearance or their feminine roles as wives and mothers (Chimba and Kitzinger, 2010 ). Even in Finland, which has a strong commitment to gender equality, the media predominantly interview male scientists as experts (Niemi and Pitkänen, 2017 ). Women experience negative stereotypes and bias when talking or writing about their work, including in teaching and presentations (Mitchell and Martin, 2018 ), research articles (Budden et al., 2008 ), and in YouTube and social media (Amarasekara and Grant, 2019 ; Veletsianos, 2012 ). But what perceptions do women in STEM have of the stereotypes which might be applied to those who speak publicly about their work?

In this study we used workshops to examine participant perceptions of which stereotypes are applied to women who speak publicly about their research or work and explore whether these stereotypes are perceived as positive or negative. Understanding the perceptions of stereotypes applied to those who publicly communicate their science allows a more nuanced understanding of the potential impact being visible or being a role model may have. We also outline how this understanding may enable the development of better mechanisms to support women in STEM.

Participants were recruited via email, website, newsletter notices, conference sessions and direct requests for workshops by the researchers. Recruitment was initially within the researchers’ home institutions but then expanded to their networks and via word of mouth. Stereotype data was collected from September 2017 until April 2018 within workshops conducted in various locations in Australia, New Zealand, USA and Japan. These workshops were conducted during conferences, women in STEM leadership/professional development programs and in sessions specifically scheduled for this research. Ethics clearance for this research was obtained from both researchers’ home institutions and all participants provided informed consent.

The workshops

The workshops ranged in size from four to 80 participants at a time. The larger workshops were broken into smaller groups (up to 10 people) for the data collection exercise, resulting in 49 distinct groups used for data collection across all 17 workshops. Each workshop followed a similar structure. After a brief introduction, large sheets of paper and colored pens were distributed to tables around the room. Working in the smaller focus groups, participants were asked to write down “all of the gender based stereotypes that are applied to women who communicate about their science [research/work]”. After 15 min, participants were then instructed to mark stereotypes as positive or negative. Participants may have had some disagreement about whether particular stereotypes were positive or negative and were instructed that this was okay and to mark these stereotypes as “both”. This positive/negative perception section elicited more discussion and storytelling within each group, so was typically allocated about 25 min. Timing for both parts could be lengthened or shortened depending upon the total time available and the nature of the engagement in the room.

Once stereotypes had been listed as positive, negative or both, groups came back together and a whole room discussion was held. One group would start to read their list of negative stereotypes. As each stereotype was read, it would be described (including use of participant derived examples if necessary for clarity) and then the facilitator would lead a short discussion on how this stereotype could be ‘flipped’—made positive or negative depending on the situation, audience, and goal of the communicator. Examples of stereotype ‘flips’ are provided in Table 1 . Each group marked off the corresponding negative stereotype on their own list so as one group finished their sheet of paper, others may have had only a few additional stereotypes. These were also discussed until all stereotypes generated by participants had been covered (time permitting). At the end of the workshop the sheets of paper were collected and retained for analysis.

Data analysis

Both researchers coded the collected sheets of paper using a cross sectional ‘code and retrieve’ method (Mason, 2002 ). Each stereotype listed was entered into a spreadsheet and then iteratively grouped into similar themes of analytical categories through a process of inductive category development (Mayring, 2000 ), which is appropriate given the limited existing knowledge (Elo and Kyngäs, 2008 ) about perceptions of stereotypes for women in STEM publicly communicating their work. As the data consisted of single words or short phrases, each individual word was read and used to derive the code categories (Miles and Huberman, 1994 ). The number of times a stereotype theme appeared on each page was also counted. For example ‘judged by appearance’, ‘too much makeup’, ‘too young’ would all be categorized within the theme ‘judged’ and counted as the judged stereotype appearing three times on that sheet.

The researchers each coded the sheets each after the first workshop and refined the categories together to ensure consistent categorization. The coding process was repeated at different times during the data collection, when approximately half the data was entered and again once all data was entered. The repetition allowed for a systematic overview of all the data collected and the development of thematic categories which best represented the data as a whole. Throughout the process, exemplars of each category were identified from the data (Hsieh and Shannon, 2005 ) and relationships between them clarified which refined the total number of categories. Any stereotypes which were interpreted differently by the researchers were discussed, resolved, and subsequently consistently coded using the validated definition.

As the purpose of this study is to explore perceptions of stereotypes, the categories have been left intentionally broad to reflect the diversity and complexity of the participants’ perspectives (Hsieh and Shannon, 2005 ). Analysis was limited to manifest, rather than latent, content meaning as the researchers could only be certain of the visible, surface content of text (Cho and Lee, 2014 ). The latent or underlying meaning (Graneheim and Lundman, 2004 ) could not have been interpreted with reasonable accuracy as little was known about the participants as individuals or the context of the conversations from which the single words or short phrases were derived. As this study is intended to be descriptive, staying to the “…surface of words…” (Sandelowski, 2000 , p. 336) was deemed the most appropriate analytical approach. Validity of the data collected is supported through the extended time spent debriefing and discussing the words and phrases elicited from participants during the workshops, ensuring that their intent and meaning was understood and accurately interpreted (Manning, 1997 ). To the authors’ knowledge this is one of, if not the only, attempt to capture perceptions of stereotypes applied to the public communication activities of women in STEM. Therefore the intent of this analysis is to present a preliminary development of the concept or model (Lindkvist, 1981 ) rather than a deeper analysis of lived experience or development of theory which grounded theory or alternative form of qualitative analysis would offer (Hsieh and Shannon, 2005 ).

Stereotype categories

About 315 people, the vast majority women, participated in the workshops with representatives from around 25 different cultural backgrounds identified. In total, data was collected from 49 different groups within 17 workshops. Participants tended to range from early career through to senior levels with the majority from within academia. Specific demographic data was not collected—identification of different demographic variables was made through either recruitment processes, workshop location or self-identification by participants during discussions.

Participant responses yielded 1273 words or phrases which were then coded into a total of 17 categories. While these categories could potentially be refined further, some of the nuance would be lost. Each category, and indicative words used in the generation of that category, are shown in Table 2 . Each category name is deliberately neutral rather than directional, even if seemingly obviously negative, as participants were asked to describe whether these are positive or negative based on their perception, as described later. Emotional and empathetic were kept separate as the emotional stereotype category typically reflected hysterical or irrational responses, whereas the empathetic stereotype category dealt more with interpersonal skills and maternal tendencies. Credibility, worth and undeserving also appear closely related but the differences are quite specific. Credibility focuses on whether women are seen as competent and experienced or as somehow lesser than their male counterparts. Worth specifically refers to whether women are perceived as being worthy of support, professional development or any other form of investment from employers. Undeserving is tied to credibility but was kept within its own category due to the comparatively common responses related to women being lucky to have achieved what they have, and the implication that sexual or other favors must be related to the woman’s success.

Perceptions of stereotypes

All individual words and phrases were counted, coded and recorded as they were indicated by the attendees to be considered positive, negative or both. The most commonly occurring category was ‘Bitchy’, with stereotypes from that category appearing 167 times across all groups; just over 13% of responses (Table 2 ). ‘Credibility’ was the next most commonly appearing category with 143 mentions (11.2%) and ‘Appearance’ in third with 130 mentions (10.2%, Table 2 ). Participants shared stories and examples during this exercise of how they changed their behavior based on the stereotype. For example, in naming a stereotype in the category of ‘Appearance’ one participant admitted to not wearing skirts at conferences or speaking engagements anymore after hearing a male scientist make a comment about a female speaker’s legs while she was on stage. Another said she purposely did not wear a lot of make-up, put her hair up and wore her glasses when she taught or gave presentations, so she would not look ‘pretty’ and would therefore be taken more seriously.

Unsurprisingly, the identified stereotypes were predominantly considered negative, especially those in the credibility, judged on appearance, annoying, confidence, worth, and undeserving categories (Fig. 1 ). Categories that were considered to be more positive included empathetic, nice, efficient, collaborative and superwoman, however participants indicated that these could also be considered negative, particularly the empathetic and nice categories (Fig. 1 ). The negative nature of the stereotype is reflected in some of the words and phrases consistently being raised in the focus groups. A word cloud generated using all words and phrases collected and used in the coding process clearly shows ‘bossy’, ‘bitchy’, and ‘emotional’ as the most commonly occurring (Fig. 2 ).

Individual focus groups rated each stereotype within the category as either negative, positive or both. Stereotypes are listed from most negatively perceived to least.

The larger the word, the more frequently it appeared in the data.

An interesting word that was commonly elicited in all workshops was ‘too’. Usually this was in the context of ‘too many’, ‘too much’, or ‘too little’ and occasionally replaced or used in conjunction with ‘overly’. Typically, these were used in relation to women’s behaviors, for example asking questions (too many), being emotional, assertive or ambitious (overly/too), or their general appearance (too pretty) including make up (too much/little) and age (too old/young). The other words that surfaced attached to a stereotype were ‘more’ or ‘less’ (e.g., more motherly than, less serious than); ‘enough’ or ‘lack of’ (e.g., not smart enough, lack of drive) and ‘not as’ or ‘overly’ (e.g., not as friendly as or overly friendly).

Confronting personal bias

After identifying the dominant stereotypes, each group was then led through an exercise to ‘flip’ the stereotype (described further in “Methods” section). The ‘flipping’ exercise created discussion amongst the participants of how they may be able to respond rather than react to the stereotype and deflate the negative connotation of the stereotype by making a measured communication choice. For example, the majority of the group had witnessed a situation when a woman was referred to as ‘bitchy’, or some other derogatory word, when she spoke her mind or stood up to someone in an assertive way; they admitted to this shaping their behavior in the future. Participants discussed the implications of when individuals make communication decisions based on a perceived stereotype versus the situation at hand.

When looking at a stereotype as positive or negative, and then flipping it, participants started to look at how they labeled not just themselves but others in various situations; they were forced to confront their own bias. During the ‘flipping’ exercise several participants, in multiple workshops, admitted to feeling annoyed by other women who demonstrated a stereotype. For example, in situations where a woman was soft-spoken or shy, some shared they were angry or annoyed at the speaker because they felt the individual perpetuated the stereotype that women are meek and do not have strong opinions. They reacted as if this made it worse for other women, instead of focusing on how they can help the other person be more confident or be heard, or that it might even be a calculated choice. Participants within each workshop were asked for a show of hands whether they had applied the identified negative stereotypes to other women themselves. Consistently 95–100% of participants at each workshop indicated that they had.

Our results show the top three stereotype categories for women in science who publicly communicate their work as ‘Bitchy’, lack of ‘Credibility’, and judged on ‘Appearance,’ with the specific stereotype words that surfaced the most being ‘bossy’, ‘bitchy’, and ‘emotional’, with ‘motherly’ in a close fourth. The top perceived stereotypes are consistent with prior studies that found women are judged more on personality and appearance, perceived as less credible than their male colleagues and are expected to be ‘warm and nurturing’ (Carli et al., 2016 ; Heilman and Okimoto, 2007 ; Mitchell and Martin, 2018 ). Responses to the ‘Empathetic’ and ‘Nice’ categories in this study showed that participants had mixed positive and negative associations, which may indicate that women were often judged more harshly when they did not conform to this stereotype, which is consistent with results in earlier studies (Ellemers, 2018 ; Heilman and Okimoto, 2007 ; Mitchell and Martin, 2018 ).

The results also show the majority of stereotypes women face when communicating are perceived to be negative. The negative perception of the stereotypes may be in part due to participants’ experience, which is consistent with the literature showing stereotypes perpetuate gender based career disadvantages and behavior expectations for women in STEM (Knobloch-Westerwick et al., 2013 ; Madera et al., 2009 ; Weitz, 2018 ). For example, many burdensome service expectations for female faculty, which are not as valued in promotion and tenure decisions, can often be attributed to the stereotypes that women are more caring, motherly, administrative and outreach oriented. This is supported by the predominantly negative perception of the ‘Administrator’ category in this study.

Although the categories of ‘Nice’ and ‘Empathetic’ were more positively regarded in this study, previous research has shown that being portrayed as ‘caring’ is not necessarily helpful for career prospects for women in STEM. Women who are seen as career oriented, competent and ‘non-traditional’ are often deemed competent but not warm, whereas those who are deemed warm are not considered competent (Fiske et al., 2002 , 2007 ) and this might actually negatively affect job prospects when communicated in recommendation letters (Madera et al., 2009 ). The stereotype categories of lesser credibility, worth and lower confidence all contribute to women being valued less than their male colleagues, as shown in the literature regarding lower salaries, hiring decisions, lower competency ratings, less willingness to mentor, and fewer invitations to speak at conferences (Moss-Racusin et al., 2012 ). Negative gender stereotypes perpetuate bias and barriers that persist for women in STEM fields including in career advancement, service burdens, salary, teaching, publishing, speaking roles, promotion and retention. Perceptions of an unfavorable, even unfriendly environment, for women in STEM also has implications for their psychological well-being and subsequent performance (Settles et al., 2016 ). This then implies that negative stereotypical perceptions do not only negatively affect women, but also the companies and organizations they work for.

Women are often encouraged into role model positions to counteract this institutional and societal bias, and close gender gaps in STEM fields (Diekman et al., 2019 ). However, this study shows that underlying implicit biases may be actively counteracting any positive contribution to social identity these role models may make. For example, comments elicited during the workshop discussions included women admitting to judging other women more harshly for displaying stereotypical traits such as being soft spoken. This is consistent with earlier research which found members of minoritized groups will punish members of the same group for public displays of potentially negative stereotypes (Opie and Phillips, 2015 ). Similarly, women showed evidence of stigma consciousness by their acknowledgment of changing their appearance and/or behavior in order to avoid negative judgment and stereotypes.

These results then beg the question: without addressing the underlying gender bias and stereotypical beliefs of individuals, STEM institutions and society, are we putting women at disproportionate risk by encouraging them to be publicly visible role models in STEM? By advocating for more women in STEM as role models, we are asking people who are already minoritized to counteract a whole raft of existing stereotypes, only to have them exposed to many of the same and other stereotypes themselves. Arguably the potential negative impacts are compounded for individuals who may have multiple minoritized group identities. What is experienced by a cisgender, middle class, white female role model in say health or biology, could be vastly different from a transwoman of a culturally diverse background who works in chemistry or engineering for example. Future research should adopt an intersectional lens to gain further understanding of how stereotypes affect STEM professionals in different disciplines and contexts.

In addition, as the lack of fit between female gender-based stereotypes and stereotypes about being a scientist can negatively impact how women in STEM are evaluated, addressing these biases and deeply held stereotypes is necessary to ensure more equitable evaluation (Carli et al., 2016 ) which has implications for subsequent career progression and potentially the under-representation of women at senior levels in STEM fields (Charlesworth and Banaji, 2019 ). Ellmers ( 2018 ) argues that change is unlikely if people do not recognize that stereotypes lie at the root of gender differences in society and work to identify and correct their own bias. Therefore, effective training to address and combat implicit and explicit bias for individuals and institutions is needed, especially for those in positions of privilege and power. Bias training is particularly important given previous studies have shown that when those in positions of power, including but not restricted to men, do not accept evidence of gender bias there is actually a higher level of implicit gender bias in their decision making (Handley et al., 2015 ; Régner et al., 2019 ). Previous studies have shown that ‘habit-breaking’ interventions using strategies such as placing oneself in the perspective of others, thinking of people as individuals rather than part of a group, or exposure to counter stereotypical examples can all be useful to address biases, especially when employed in combination (Charlesworth and Banaji, 2019 ). It is also important to recognize the utility of this training for women in STEM themselves, with both exposure to female peers and counter-stereotypical role models (male and female) increasing self-efficacy beliefs about success in STEM (Cheryan et al., 2011 ; Stout et al., 2011 )

Although men are more likely to hold positions of power in STEM organizations, a common theme that emerged in the workshops was that it was not just men who were perpetuating the problem. Women felt judged and held back by other women, especially those who had advanced to leadership positions, which supports the findings of an earlier study which showed the tendency of minoritized groups to ‘police’ their own members who exhibit a stereotype (Opie and Phillips, 2015 ). Simply, women may judge other women more harshly who demonstrate a stereotype, or it may be evidence of the queen bee phenomenon, or more likely it is simply underlying implicit bias. The knowledge of the existence of negative stereotypes, however unfairly labeled, may prevent women from speaking up for fear of being labeled by the stereotype, advocating on behalf of other women or from appearing publicly in a professional capacity at all.

Bias also presented itself in qualifying words like ‘too’, ‘less than’ or ‘more’, which set up an invisible line where a behavior is acceptable, and when it is not. Qualifiers are arbitrary and often differ from person to person. Words like these may encourage an us-versus-them mentality and set up a divide between groups, propagating an environment where the impacts of bias persist and where women are held to a double standard (Rivera and Tilcsik, 2019 ). Who gets to decide what is ‘too much’ or ‘too little’, or whether someone is ‘more’ or ‘less than’ someone else? The results of this study imply that there is a preferred amount or level of these characteristics; a tightrope upon which women in particular must balance. However, considering there is not an accepted designation of the ‘preferred’ amount, it is often dictated by those in a position of power or privilege, shaped by their own bias and stereotypes.

Being aware of the stereotypes presented here, and the implicit and explicit bias they perpetuate, is the first step in combating them. Most people have some level of gendered stereotype bias. A recent study by UNDP showed that worldwide, 91% of men and 86% of women hold at least one bias against women with regard to politics, economics, education, violence or reproductive rights (UNDP, 2020 ). By acknowledging and understanding individual reactions to stereotypes applied to women in STEM, we better understand where our own bias may emerge, and are more equipped to tackle it. It also allows us to more thoroughly examine the impact that being a role model and communicating science publicly has on women in STEM. In addition, understanding stereotypes and our own reactions to them, may enable the development of better mechanisms to support women in STEM who assume role model positions.

This study used conventional qualitative analysis techniques which provide a baseline overview of perceptions of stereotypes, rather than a deeper analysis or development of theory. Future work may wish to build upon the results presented here to develop more fulsome understandings of the relationship between these stereotypes and lived experience of women and other minoritized groups in STEM, which could be further supported through the inclusion of participant demographic data. This would also allow for latent analysis of content to provide deeper and richer data and understanding. The results presented here were collected from people who had chosen to attend, and participate in, a workshop specifically about stereotypes and women in STEM. Future studies may wish to broaden this participant pool to gather perceptions of those not inherently interested in the topic. In addition, as all but one of the workshops was marketed to scientists identifying as women, further studies may wish to include male and non-binary scientists.

Role models may be held up as a means of addressing prevailing stereotypes, however it appears that the equally important element of inclusion is being ignored. By encouraging women to be visible and communicate their work publicly, and then holding them to double-standards in communication and labeling them as bitchy, bossy, or undeserving, we are failing. By pushing solutions that include more women in STEM as role models, without addressing underlying negative stereotypes they will face, we may actually be putting those women in a more precarious position. Acknowledging and understanding the multifaceted, and often at odds, stereotypes that women in STEM face when communicating in public is the first step in changing the narrative and developing better mechanisms to support women in STEM.

The results presented in this study show that the prevailing perceptions of the stereotypes applied to women who speak publicly about their work are largely negative. These are the perceptions of women who, through participating in this study, are showing an interest in matters of equity and diversity. Any attempts to support greater gender equity and inclusion then must also acknowledge our own biases and deeply held stereotypes and recognize how they might affect our behavior and judgment regarding ourselves and others. Creating networks of support for women and giving them tools and space to address gender bias in STEM can help in battling discrimination. However, to truly change the system we must train everyone, including ourselves and especially those in positions of power and privilege, to be effective bystanders against gender bias, sexual harassment, and the perpetuation of negative stereotypes.

Data availability

The datasets generated during and/or analyzed during this study are not publicly available due to the potential for individuals/groups to be identified, but are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.

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These authors contributed equally: Merryn McKinnon, Christine O’Connell.

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Centre for the Public Awareness of Science, Australian National University, Canberra, ACT, 2601, Australia

Merryn McKinnon

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McKinnon, M., O’Connell, C. Perceptions of stereotypes applied to women who publicly communicate their STEM work. Humanit Soc Sci Commun 7 , 160 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-020-00654-0

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Gender stereotypes change outcomes: a systematic literature review

Journal of Humanities and Applied Social Sciences

ISSN : 2632-279X

Article publication date: 15 December 2021

Issue publication date: 19 October 2023

Even though researchers have discussed gender stereotype change, only a few studies have specifically projected outcomes or consequences. Hence, the main purpose of this study is to examine the impact of gender stereotype change concerning the different outcomes.

Design/methodology/approach

In achieving the purpose, the authors searched and reviewed current empirical knowledge on the outcomes of gender stereotype change in the Scopus and EBSCOhost databases from 1970 to 2020. The entire process was conducted through a systematic literature review methodology. The article selection criteria were executed using the PRISMA article selection flowchart steps, and 15 articles were included for the review.

The findings reveal that the outcomes from gender stereotype change research can be categorized mainly under the themes of “family and children,” “marriage” and “equality and women's employment.”

Research limitations/implications

The co-occurrence network visualization map reveals gaps in the existing literature. There may be more possible outcomes relating to the current realities, and more cross-cultural research is needed.

Practical implications

These outcomes provide some implications for policymakers.

Originality/value

Even though researchers have discussed gender stereotype change on its various outcomes or consequences, research is less. Hence, this study provides a synthesis of consequences and addresses the gaps in the area.

• Gender stereotypes change
• Systematic literature review

Priyashantha, K.G. , De Alwis, A.C. and Welmilla, I. (2023), "Gender stereotypes change outcomes: a systematic literature review", Journal of Humanities and Applied Social Sciences , Vol. 5 No. 5, pp. 450-466. https://doi.org/10.1108/JHASS-07-2021-0131

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Copyright © 2021, K.G. Priyashantha, A. Chamaru De Alwis and Indumathi Welmilla

Published in Journal of Humanities and Applied Social Sciences . Published by Emerald Publishing Limited. This article is published under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY 4.0) licence. Anyone may reproduce, distribute, translate and create derivative works of this article (for both commercial and non-commercial purposes), subject to full attribution to the original publication and authors. The full terms of this licence may be seen at http://creativecommons.org/licences/by/4.0/legalcode

Introduction

A society's beliefs about the appropriate roles for men and women are gender role attitudes, gender ideology ( Davis and Greenstein, 2009 ) or gender stereotypes ( Attanapola, 2004 ; Berridge et al. , 2009 ; Bosak et al. , 2018 ; Charlesworth and Banaji, 2021 ; De Silva and Priyashantha, 2014 ; Eagly et al. , 2020 ; Lopez-Zafra and Garcia-Retamero, 2021 ). Such beliefs are formed from the peoples' observations of the behavior of men and women in different social roles ( Priyashantha et al. , 2021b ). Particularly, when women or men demonstrate certain behavior more typical to different social roles more often than the opposite sex, such behaviors are believed to be the common traits relevant to men or women ( Eagly et al. , 2020 ; Eagly and Karau, 2002 ). Hence, men are believed to be assertive, independent, rational and decisive, while women are believed to be showing concern for others, warmth, helpfulness and nurturance ( Hoyt et al. , 2009 ). These attributes concerning men and women are referred to as agentic (masculine) and communal (feminine), respectively ( Abele, 2003 ). This agency and communion are then perceived as the fundamental motivators in men's and women's behaviors ( Bakan, 1966 ). However, researchers argue that these perceptions have changed in the contemporary world of work, which has been promoted by females' income-generating activities ( Eagly et al. , 2020 ). Social and economic developments took place, and United Nations initiatives (e.g. human rights, gender equality, nondiscrimination against women, women in development programs) ( Benería et al. , 2015 ) have backed this females' income generation in the mid-20th century in most countries ( Attanapola, 2004 ; Boehnke, 2011 ; Zosuls et al. , 2011 ). These female income generation activities have, in turn, resulted in changes in social role distribution where both men and women are now in multiple roles as parents, employees, employers, volunteers, friends, spouses, siblings, etc. ( Najeema, 2010 ; Perrigino et al. , 2021 ). Thus, peoples' various roles include women's work in men's roles and vice versa ( Blau and Kahn, 2006 ; Mergaert, 2012 ) while playing their traditional roles ( Eagly et al. , 2020 ). This trend has evolved the traditional gender role stereotypes into changing gender stereotypes during the last 50 years ( Blau and Kahn, 2006 ; Mergaert, 2012 ; Priyashantha et al. , 2021b ).

Even though it has been almost 50 years for research into changing gender stereotypes, there are scholarly arguments for the prevalence of traditional gender stereotypes ( Haines et al. , 2016 ; Rudman et al. , 2012 ; Rudman and Glick, 2001 ). Some theoretical bases and the prevalence of some cultures that value gender stereotyping further support these scholarly arguments. Meanwhile, there is an opinion that gender stereotyping violates human rights ( Tabassum and Nayak, 2021 ). Such an opinion is justified by the fact that gender stereotyping limits the capacity of women and men to develop their attributes or professional skills and make decisions about their lives and plans ( Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, 2014 ). Therefore, researchers have been highly interested in finding whether gender stereotypes have changed or not in societies ( Bosak et al. , 2018 ; Eagly et al. , 2020 ; Haines et al. , 2016 ; Lopez-Zafra and Garcia-Retamero, 2012 , 2021 ; Twenge, 1997a , b ; Ugwu, 2021 ). Instead, it is reported that there are more gender gaps in employment participation in some countries. If the gender stereotypes have changed, theoretically, there should be no such gender gap. Researching this question, the researchers have also been interested in how gender stereotypes change cross-culturally ( Boehnke, 2011 ; Constantin and Voicu, 2015 ; Diekman et al. , 2005 ; Diekman and Eagly, 2000 ; Lopez-Zafra and Garcia-Retamero, 2011 ). Accordingly, they have found that gender stereotypes have changed in Europe ( Berkery et al. , 2013 ; Boehnke, 2011 ; Garcia-Retamero et al. , 2011 ; Lopez-Zafra and Garcia-Retamero, 2012 ) and America ( Alfieri et al. , 1996 ; Beere et al. , 1984 ; Bem, 1974 ; Broverman et al. , 1970 ; Deaux and Lewis, 1984 ; Gill et al. , 1987 ; Lueptow et al. , 1995 ; Parelius, 1975 ; Spence and Hahn, 2016 ; Twenge, 1997a ; Twenge et al. , 2012 ; Zosuls et al. , 2011 ). In addition to that, researchers have found that the gender stereotype change has taken place in East Asia ( Boehnke, 2011 ), Africa ( Bosak et al. , 2018 ) and the Arab World ( Sikdar and Mitra, 2012 ) as well. Some global level studies also confirm that gender stereotype change has occurred in most countries with minor exceptions ( Brown, 1991 ; Charlesworth and Banaji, 2021 ; Constantin and Voicu, 2015 ; Williams and Best, 1990 ). We know that if something happened, this could have various outcomes related to the incident. Accordingly, as the gender stereotype change has also taken place, there could be multiple outcomes associated with it. However, to the best of our knowledge, there is minimal research on this subject matter ( Priyashantha et al. , 2021c ).

Therefore, with the expectation of finding the outcomes of gender stereotype change, we positioned the central question of the current study as, what is the impact of gender stereotype change? Thus, the present study systematically and quantitatively analyzes selected literature in the last 50 years to identify the outcomes of gender stereotypes and gaps in the prevailing knowledge.

Methodology

This article is positioned as Systematic Literature Review (SLR). The SLRs require a prior protocol to be developed to document the inclusion and exclusion of studies and analysis methods ( Pahlevan-Sharif et al. , 2019 ). We did a comprehensive literature search for this study, and a protocol was designed before the article search. There is a standard way of reporting the SLR known as Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA- Liberati et al. , 2009 ), which is highly recommended in Medicine. However, as there is no such framework in social sciences, authors who intend to conduct the SLR tend to use the narrative and arbitrary guidelines ( Pahlevan-Sharif et al. , 2019 ; Petticrew and Roberts, 2006 ). Instead, in this study, for the article selection process to be objective and systematic, we followed the PRISMA article selection flow chart steps to select the articles.

The PRISMA article selection flow diagram has four steps: identification, screening, eligibility and included, and we followed them in the article selection. The identifications stage includes database, search terms and search criteria. The databases were Scopus and Ebscohost for searching the articles. The search terms were “gender stereotype change” and “outcomes.” The search criteria or algorithm was developed by combining the terms with AND operative, and each search term was given similar words combined with OR operative. Accordingly, we retrieved 56 articles from Scopus and 68 Articles from EBSCOhost databases. Subsequently, the retrieved list containing the title, abstract, keywords, authors' names and affiliations, journal name, cited numbers and year, etc., was exported to a Microsoft Excel sheet. The duplicates were then searched and removed.

The screening stage includes eliminating the articles when their titles and abstracts do not meet the inclusion criteria ( Meline, 2006 ). The inclusion criteria for the current study were the “empirical studies” published in “academic journals” in “English” on “gender stereotype change” during the “1970–2020” period. Thus, the reason for selecting 1970 as the entry point was that gender stereotype change started in 1970, and it was extended to 2020 to include more studies for the review. Each author of the current research independently went through each title and abstract and eliminated the studies that did not meet the inclusion criteria. Notably, if there was any disagreement about elimination was resolved through discussion and consensus. Hence, we excluded 73 articles that were based on “review,” “qualitative,” “books,” “book chapters,” “magazines,” “conference papers,” “non-English” and “non-relevance to the current study's scope.” Then, the remaining 50 articles' full-text versions were retrieved for assessing their eligibility, which is the next step of the PRISMA flow diagram.

Since the articles have already been screened out up to this stage, evaluating their methodological reporting for eligibility checking is much better ( Meline, 2006 ). It is justifiable as we had taken an inclusion criterion as “empirical studies.” Thus, the evaluation areas may be the population, methodology, methods, design, context, etc., and can find the reasons for excluding the articles as “ambiguous methods” and “required original information from the author,” etc. ( Meline, 2006 ). Accordingly, we independently evaluated each article on such grounds. We identified some studies based on qualitative reviews, perspectives, ambiguous methods and some sought original information about the methodology from the authors. They all were excluded through our discussion and consensus. In total, we identified 35 papers as irrelevant at this stage, and finally, we selected 15 articles for the review. They are shown in Table 1 , and the process we followed for article selection is shown in Figure 1 .

The Microsoft Excel sheet was then modified, and the data in it were fed into the VOSviewer Software to run the keyword co-occurrence and term co-occurrence network visualization maps. That was to identify the core themes in the selected studies scientifically. Notably, the keyword co-occurrence is to identify the main areas touched from the keywords of the studies as the keywords of a research article denote its primary content on a particular field of investigation. Moreover, the term co-occurrence analysis is to identify more about studies than the keywords co-occurrence as it searches key terms reflected in the titles and abstracts of each article.

Results and analysis

This section is mainly organized to present the results of the SLR and analyze them. It primarily consists of two sections: descriptive analysis and literature classification.

Descriptive analysis

The year-wise article distribution is shown in Figure 2 . Even the 50 years considered for the review, the empirical studies reported on outcomes of gender stereotype change since 1998. Figure 2 shows that at least one empirical study has been conducted for each year during the 1998–2020 period. Moreover, there is a high frequency of studies in 2005, 2017 and 2018 years. Table 2 shows the methodological reporting of the studies. It reveals that studies have been conducted based on large samples drawn on panel surveys. The information ensures the validity of the selected studies for the review, as we had an inclusion criterion for selecting papers as “empirical studies.” Concerning the context under which studies were conducted ( Figure 3 ), the USA takes the led by having seven empirical studies published (1970–2020). Canada is in the second position having two studies during the period. Australia, China, the Netherlands, Norway, Spain and United Kingdom have conducted one study each.

Literature classification

The classification of results is critical in finding out actual work done on the objective set for the research ( Jabeen et al. , 2020 ; Priyashantha et al. , 2021a ). Since the main research objective of the current study was to identify the outcomes of the gender stereotype change, this section mainly classifies the results relating to that. As the keyword co-occurrence network analysis is suitable for identifying the critical areas on a particular investigation, we used it for our study to answer the study's central question. Figure 4 shows the output of it.

The size of the node denotes the number of occurrences in a keyword co-occurrences visualization map. Hence, the higher the number of occurrences, the larger the node's size. Thus, our analysis of the keyword co-occurrences found that “gender,” “employment” and “longitudinal research” denoted in larger nodes in the map ( Figure 4 ). It reveals that they are the keywords that have frequently occurred in studies. We know that “gender” is highly associated with gender stereotypes. It may be a justifiable reason why it happens so often in studies. “Employment” opportunities are also justifiable since it has been proven that employment opportunities have been a significant cause for gender stereotypes changes ( Eagly et al. , 2020 ). Moreover, as almost all the studies in the sample have adopted the “longitudinal research” design, the keyword “longitudinal research” has also fallen to the frequently occurring category. It demonstrates the methods used by the selected articles and their suitability to the current study.

Additionally, Figure 4 shows four main clusters denoted in different colors containing different keywords in each cluster. More specifically, Table 3 shows the number of terms in each cluster, indicating that changing gender stereotype outcomes varied by different areas of investigations. Grouping the keywords into one cluster is regarded as the keywords' likelihood to reflect similar topics. Hence, clusters one and two (as stated in Table 3 ) have the highest number of keywords and suggest that the topics highlighted in those are the centralized fields in gender stereotype change and outcome research. Thus, the central areas highlighted are “attitudes,” “cohabitation,” “fertility,” “life course,” “living arrangements,” “marriage,” “couples,” “employment,” “family economics,” “gender roles,” “longitudinal research” and “marital quality.”

Moreover, the term co-occurrence network visualization map created by the VOSviewer software ( Figure 5 ) is treated as more detailed than the keyword co-occurrence analysis. It provides an analysis that goes beyond the keywords as it further investigates the areas focused on in the title and abstracts of the studies. Hence, creating this type of map further identified the areas frequently investigated on gender stereotypes change outcomes. Accordingly, Figure 5 categorized the terms into three clusters in Blue, Red and Green. In the Blue cluster, there are two terms as “family” and “child.” A common theme can be formed for them as family and child-related outcomes. As we did a detailed search for the outcomes in each article, we could summarize them in Table 4 . Hence, we could extract different family and children-related outcomes from Table 4 . They are; “Family Role Overload and Stress” ( Duxbury et al. , 2018 ), “Subsequent School Enrollment” ( Cunningham et al. , 2005 ), “Fewer Children” ( Barber and Axinn, 1998 ), “Delay in Marital Parenthood” ( Cunningham et al. , 2005 ) and “Children's Convergence of Egalitarian Attitudes” ( Dawson et al. , 2016 ).

Concerning the family and children-related outcomes, Duxbury et al. (2018) have found that the “family role overload” of both husbands and wives was consequent in changing gender stereotype contexts. The sense of family role overload then becomes a strong predictor of couples' “perceived stress” ( Duxbury et al. , 2018 ). The perceived stress can undermine the health and well-being of people. The literature confirms that “psychological strains” and “disorders” ( Hébert et al. , 2017 ), “adverse impacts on the immune system” ( Barry et al. , 2020 ; Cohen et al. , 1999 ), “low quality of life,” “insomnia,” “burnout” ( Ribeiro et al. , 2018 ) and “family distress” ( Aryee et al. , 1999 ) resultant from the stress. When the stress becomes to distress level, there is a high possibility of causing chronic diseases and mortality ( Barry et al. , 2020 ). Therefore, these findings provide more implications for the policymakers to emphasize reducing those negative outcomes.

Apart from this, young adults' biases toward changing gender role attitudes can cause “subsequent school enrolments” ( Ciabattari, 2001 ; Cunningham et al. , 2005 ). It is severe, particularly among women, as they need to acquire knowledge to upgrade their employment status ( Cunningham et al. , 2005 ) and be independent ( Goldscheider and Goldscheider, 1993 ). However, later school enrollment may hinder performing family roles of adults as intensive time is devoted to education ( Marini, 1978 ). Moreover, women with changing attitudes toward gender roles are “less likely to have children” ( Barber and Axinn, 1998 ) and “delay in marital parenthood” ( Cunningham et al. , 2005 ). As a result, the future society could go into a severe crisis regarding population growth ( Barber and Axinn, 1998 ). It could be challenging to find people for growth prospects in economies. Therefore, the policymakers need to consider this seriously and try to overcome that. In the meantime, scholars need to focus on further research on this outcome to confirm this viewpoint further.

The last outcome of the family and children-related category is the “children's convergence of egalitarian attitudes” ( Dawson et al. , 2016 ). It indicates that gender stereotype changes could evolve over the generations and possibly consequent the different outcomes of gender stereotype change. It implies that more research on this area is required to find more associated outcomes.

The cluster in Red ( Figure 5 ) has categorized the terms as; “Role Attitude,” “Attitudes,” “Cohabitation,” “Marriage” and “Consequences.” Out of them, the “role attitudes,” “attitudes” and “consequences” are the general search terms related to the concept of gender stereotype change outcomes, and hence, we ignored them for review. However, the remaining two terms, “marriage” and “cohabitation,” were considered for the review. Since these terms are related to marriage, we themed them as “marriage-related.” Hence, marriage-related outcomes we found were “Increased Cohabitation, Low Marriage Rate” ( Barber and Axinn, 1998 ), “Delay in Marriage” ( Cunningham et al. , 2005 ), “Low Satisfaction,” “Low Relationship Quality,” “Low Stability in Marital Relationships” ( Blom and Hewitt, 2020 ) and “Attitude Convergence in Marriage” ( Kalmijn, 2005 ).

The “increased cohabitation,” “low marriage rate” ( Barber and Axinn, 1998 ) and “delay in marriage” ( Cunningham et al. , 2005 ) can subsequently impact the population growth negatively ( Barber and Axinn, 1998 ). If such outcomes exist over time, it could be a barrier to the progression of societies. However, another finding reveals that gender stereotype change increases childbirth to single parents in recent decades ( Cunningham et al. , 2005 ). Therefore, it is difficult to directly conclude that such outcomes negatively affect population growth or societal progression. More research is needed to find the associated outcomes of these consequences so that reasonable judgments can be made whether such outcomes generate more negative or positive effects on the population, society or any other.

Moreover, in marital relationships, Australian-related research has found that “low satisfaction,” “low relationship quality” and “low stability” ( Blom and Hewitt, 2020 ) were consequent from the gender stereotype changes. All of which resemble negative outcomes by their surface nature. However, another finding reveals that “attitude convergence in marriage” ( Kalmijn, 2005 ) occurred due to gender stereotype changes. It is contrary to the previous finding, which is a positive outcome by its surface nature.

Most importantly, for these types of outcomes, positivity or negativity is dependent on cultural values. The negative outcomes as “low satisfaction,” “low relationship quality” and “low stability” may be very accurate for the cultures which value male breadwinner family structures ( Blom and Hewitt, 2020 ). However, more opposing consequences, like “attitude convergence in marriage” ( Kalmijn, 2005 ), can be found in cultures with more egalitarian values like Nordic countries ( Vitali and Arpino, 2016 ). Hence, in total, the positivity or negativity of outcomes is a matter of societal and cultural values. Therefore, generalizing interpretations about the positivity or negativity of each outcome is suitable with more cross-cultural research. Similarly, further research is needed regarding the associated outcomes of each of these outcomes.

Finally, the Green cluster has the terms as; “Outcomes,” “Gender Differences,” “Gender Egalitarianism,” “Work” and “Women.” As in other clusters, we had a common search term, “outcome,” in this cluster, and we ignored it. Except that, the terms “gender difference” and “gender egalitarianism” seem to represent a common theme of “equality.” The remaining terms “work” and “women” are merged, and a theme can be given as “women's employment.” Thus, this cluster is then characterized by the theme of “equality and women employments.” Specifically, under this cluster, we found the outcomes of “Reduction of Gender Role Stereotyping” ( Dawson et al. , 2016 ), “Egalitarian Essentialism” ( Cotter et al. , 2011 ), “Non-Difference in Men or Women for Work-Life” ( Lyness and Judiesch, 2014 ) and “Gender Differences in Personality Cross-Culturally” ( Schmitt et al. , 2017 ), and they can be related to the equality. Similarly, the “Women's Full-Time Employment,” “Women's Independent Living” ( Cunningham et al. , 2005 ), “More Working Hours” and “More Income for Women” ( Corrigall and Konrad, 2007 ) and “Increased Entrepreneurial Intention of Women” ( Perez-Quintana et al. , 2017 ) were found, and they can be categorized under the theme of women's employment. Moreover, the outcomes of the “Reduction of the Women's Disadvantage in Entering Male-Dominated Occupations” ( He and Zhou, 2018 ) and “Economic Rationality of Females” ( Onozaka and Hafzi, 2019 ) are also categorized to the theme of “women's employment.”

Thus, the “equality” related outcomes in the “equality and women's employment,” the “reduction of traditional gender role stereotyping” ( Dawson et al. , 2016 ), “egalitarian essentialism” ( Cotter et al. , 2011 ) and “non-difference in men or women for work-life” ( Lyness and Judiesch, 2014 ) may change in different cultural contexts. As we have various cultural contexts that value either traditional gender norms or gender stereotype change, more cross-cultural research is needed to interpret such outcomes. Moreover, one cross-cultural study found that a “gender difference in personality” is consequenced even though people's gender stereotype attitudes have already changed ( Schmitt et al. , 2017 ). Therefore, this finding confirms the overall behavioral diversity of people, including diversity in gender role behaviors, although the equality of gender roles is emphasized.

Concerning women's employment-related outcomes, such as increases in “women's full-time employment opportunities” ( Cunningham et al. , 2005 ), “reduction of women's disadvantage in entering male-dominated occupations” ( He and Zhou, 2018 ), “more working hours and more income for women” ( Corrigall and Konrad, 2007 ) and “their increased entrepreneurial intention” ( Perez-Quintana et al. , 2017 ), women's “economic rationality” ( Onozaka and Hafzi, 2019 ) reveals the women's improved economic status. Moreover, the findings like increased “women's independent living” ( Cunningham et al. , 2005 ) represent their independent decision-making. The positive side of these is that they reduce the gender gap in employment participation and the ultimate contribution to economic growth. However, since we have different cultures worldwide, more cross-cultural research is needed to generalize this. As discussed under “family and children” related outcomes, the negative side of women's employment-related outcomes is the missing family responsibilities or adverse health effects and low reproductivity. Therefore, this provides an implication for policymakers to avoid those harmful effects. In the meantime, as the socialization forces are diverse over time ( Brown and Stone, 2016 ), researchers can further test whether these types of outcomes exist over time.

In the network visualization map in Figure 5 , the circles' size denotes the number of occurrences. It suggests that the higher the number of occurrences, the larger the circle's size. Accordingly, the term “women” is then considered to be the frequently used term. It implies that the women-related outcomes should have been investigated repeatedly. However, even the term “women” has been found to be co-occurred many times in this study, our detailed analysis of each article found that the different women-related outcomes have been investigated only once. Instead, the other outcomes related to terms represented by the nodes in Figure 5 have not been co-occurred or tested frequently in the studies. Hence, overall, more research is needed to be a well-established knowledge on each outcome of stereotype change found in this study.

Gender stereotype change has been given scholarly attention since the 1970s. Traditional gender stereotypes have evolved into gender stereotype change or egalitarian gender stereotypes with females' participation in employment ( Brandth et al. , 2017 ; Mergaert et al. , 2013 ). This gender stereotype change has created various outcomes in various areas. This SLR studied the outcomes of gender stereotype change in the literature during the 1970–2020 period. The literature search was conducted using the Scopus and EBSCOhost databases. Empirical studies were mainly focused on selecting the articles. Initially, we extracted 124 articles for screening. After assessing their eligibility, we finally selected 15 articles for the review. They were subjected to the keyword and term co-occurrence analysis for finding the themes of gender stereotypes change outcomes.

The findings reveal that outcomes of gender stereotypes change are under the main themes of “family and children,” “marriage” and “equality and women's employment.” There are very few studies found relating to the “family and children” related outcomes. They are “Family Role Overload and Stress” ( Duxbury et al. , 2018 ), “Fewer Children” ( Barber and Axinn, 1998 ), “Later School Enrollment” ( Cunningham et al. , 2005 ) and “Children's Convergence of Egalitarian Attitudes” ( Dawson et al. , 2016 ). Of these results, it was found that all other results, except for the convergence of children's egalitarian attitudes ( Dawson et al. , 2016 ), had some adverse effects, such as neglect of family responsibilities and negative effects on health and female fertility. They provide implications to policymakers to ovoid those harmful effects. Moreover, more research is needed to test whether these outcomes exist over time since the socialization forces are diverse ( Brown and Stone, 2016 ).

Compared to the “family and children” related outcomes, more outcomes have found “marriage” associated outcomes. They are “Increase Cohabitation,” “Low Marriage Rate” ( Barber and Axinn, 1998 ), “Delay in Marriage” ( Cunningham et al. , 2005 ), “Attitude Convergence in Marriage” ( Kalmijn, 2005 ), “Low Satisfaction,” “Lower Relationship Quality” and “Low Stability in Marital Relationships” ( Blom and Hewitt, 2020 ). “The Increase in Cohabitation,” “Low Marriage Rate” ( Barber and Axinn, 1998 ) and “Delay in Marriage” ( Cunningham et al. , 2005 ) can further negatively impact the population growth ( Barber and Axinn, 1998 ). However, more research is needed regarding these outcomes and their associated outcomes to generalize whether they generate more positive or negative consequences. Moreover, concerning all the marriage-related outcomes, their positivity or negativity cannot be determined from their surface interpretation. More research is needed to be done on the associated outcomes of each of these outcomes. Moreover, as the marriage-related outcomes are subjected to cultural perspectives on gender roles, we cannot determine the positivity or negativity of such outcomes without doing more cross-cultural studies. Therefore, more cross-cultural research is needed.

Compared to the family and children and marriage-related outcomes, more outcomes were found relating to equality and women's employment-related category. For the analysis purposes, we further categorized them into two sub-themes as equality and women's employment-related. The “equality”-related outcomes found were; “Reduction of Traditional Gender Role Stereotyping” ( Dawson et al. , 2016 ), “Egalitarian Essentialism” ( Cotter et al. , 2011 ), “Non-Difference in Men or Women for Work-Life” ( Lyness and Judiesch, 2014 ), “Gender Difference in Personality” ( Schmitt et al. , 2017 ). We believe that these outcomes may change in different cultural contexts. Hence, more cross-cultural research is needed to make generalizations. Similarly, the women's employment-related outcomes found were: increases in “Women's Full-Time Employment Opportunities” ( Cunningham et al. , 2005 ), “Reduction of Women's Disadvantage in Entering Male-Dominated Occupations” ( He and Zhou, 2018 ), “More Working Hours and More Income for Women” ( Corrigall and Konrad, 2007 ), “Women's Increased Entrepreneurial Intention” ( Perez-Quintana et al. , 2017 ), “Women's Independent Living” ( Cunningham et al. , 2005 ) and their “Economic Rationality” ( Onozaka and Hafzi, 2019 ). These outcomes reveal the improved economic status and independent living of females. These can help reduce the employment gender gap that ultimately contributes to economic growth. For this also, more cross-cultural research is needed to make more generalizations. It is proven in this study that family responsibilities are missed and have adverse effects on health and reproductivity when females are involved in employment opportunities. Therefore, the outcomes provide an implication for the policymakers to ovoid those harmful effects. Moreover, more research is needed to test whether these outcomes exist over time since the socialization forces are diverse ( Brown and Stone, 2016 ).

Practicality and research implications

There are implications for future researchers from the findings of the current research. Although the 50 years considered for reviewing the literature on gender stereotype outcomes, we were able to find very few outcomes from only 15 studies conducted on an empirical basis. Therefore, more research is needed on this area. More specifically, gender stereotyping is coupled with cultural values on gender norms. Mainly, we have cultures on gender role stereotyping and gender role egalitarianism. Therefore, future researches need to focus more research on a cross-cultural basis. Moreover, since the socialization forces are diverse, complex and continuously evolving, more research is essential to have a well-established knowledge of gender stereotype change outcomes.

Additionally, the outcome of “Family Role Overload and Stress” ( Duxbury et al. , 2018 ) has a high possibility to create more health risks to the employees whose gender role attitude changed. Moreover, “Fewer Children” ( Barber and Axinn, 1998 ), “Later School Enrollment” ( Cunningham et al. , 2005 ), “Increase in Cohabitation,” “Low Marriage Rate” ( Barber and Axinn, 1998 ) and “Delay in Marriage” ( Cunningham et al. , 2005 ), and all the outcomes of women employment-related category can negatively impact on population growth. Therefore, they provide implications to policymakers to ovoid those harmful effects.

PRISMA article selection flow diagram

Year-wise research article distribution

Country-wise article publication

Keywords co-occurrence network visualization map

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Acknowledgements

Funding : No funding was available for this research

Authors Contributions : All authors contributed to the study conception, design, material preparation, data collection and analysis. All versions of drafts of the manuscript were written by Author 1, and other authors commented and revised. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.

Availability: Data collected during the current study are not publicly available. However, they can be available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request.

Conflicts of Interest : On behalf of all authors, the corresponding author states that there is no conflict of interest.

Corresponding author

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ORIGINAL RESEARCH article

Stereotype content at the intersection of gender and sexual orientation.

• 1 Department of Psychology, Lund University, Lund, Sweden
• 2 Department of Psychology, Stockholm University, Stockholm, Sweden

According to the Stereotype Content Model (SCM), the content of stereotypes differs on two dimensions: communion and agency. Research shows that for stereotypes about the general gender categories of “women” and “men,” there is an ambivalent pattern of communion and agency, where high levels on one dimension are associated with low levels on the other. For sexual minority stereotypes, a gender inversion has been found, whereas homosexual women are seen as more similar to men in general than to women in general, whereas homosexual men are seen as more similar to women in general than to men in general. However, there is limited research on how stereotype content for general groups relate to stereotype content for subgroups with intersecting category memberships. This research addresses this gap by investigating stereotype content at the intersection of gender and sexual orientation, including stereotype content for general gender groups, heterosexual groups, homosexual groups, and bisexual groups. In Study 1, a community sample from Sweden ( N = 824) rated perceived communion and agency for women and men in general, as well as hetero-, homo-, and bisexual women and men. In Study 2, a nationally representative Swedish sample ( N = 424) performed the same rating task, and in addition completed Single-Category IATs (SC-IATs) for warmth and competence. Results from both studies show that the stereotype content for the general categories “women” and “men” overlap with the stereotype content for heterosexual same-gender targets. Homosexual and bisexual groups were rated as more similar to their non-congruent gender category than same gender heterosexual categories were, but stereotype content for sexual minority groups did not overlap with either general gender categories, thus showing only incomplete gender inversion of stereotype content. Implicit associations between “women” and “warmth” were significantly stronger than associations between “men” and “warmth.” There were no other significant relations between implicit associations to warmth/competence and gender or sexual orientation. Theoretical and methodological implications for future research into intersectional stereotype content are presented, including how the findings inform the co-dependent relationship between a binary gender structure and a heteronormative ideology.

Introduction

Stereotypes are cognitive schemas that incorporate culturally shared representations of social groups and influence information processing related to social categorization ( Dovidio et al., 2010 ; Yzerbyt, 2016 ). Stereotypes are thus both characteristics seen as common within a social group, for instance, “gay men are fashionable,” and something that influences social categorization, for instance, “because that man is fashionable he is probably gay” ( Cox and Devine, 2015 ). Stereotype content has been found to generally vary along two dimensions of social content: agency and communion ( Abele and Wojciszke, 2014 ; Fiske, 2019 ). Agency consists of social content relevant for goal achievement and task functioning, while communion consists of social content relevant to relationship maintenance and social functioning ( Abele and Wojciszke, 2014 ). The Stereotype Content Model (SCM) provides a functional explanation for why stereotype content is organized into these two dimensions, suggesting that the degree of agency and communion is determined by societal status and perceived competitiveness of the group ( Fiske et al., 2002 ; Caprariello et al., 2009 ; Durante et al., 2013 ; Kervyn et al., 2015 ). Communion and agency have previously been treated as distinct from the dimensions of warmth and competence, which are the dimensions that the SCM was built around, but later developments have established that the dimensions are parallel to each other. The dimensions that have been called warmth and communion are both made up of the facets warmth and morality, while the dimensions that have been called competence and agency are made up of the facets competence and assertiveness ( Abele et al., 2016 ; Fiske, 2019 ). The terms communion and agency will be used throughout this article unless the intension is to address specific facets of these dimensions.

Within the SCM, special emphasis is placed on the combined evaluation of a social group’s communion and agency, with many groups displaying ambivalent stereotype content; for instance being seen as warm but not competent ( Fiske et al., 2002 ). Expanding on the implications of stereotype content, the degree of communion and agency included in a group stereotype can then predict societal behavioral responses toward the group ( Cuddy et al., 2007 ; Fiske et al., 2007 ; Caprariello et al., 2009 ; Kervyn et al., 2015 ; Bye and Herrebrøden, 2018 ). The SCM thus provides an explanatory framework connecting stereotype content to social structure, as well as to intergroup behaviors.

Stereotype content for a large number of groups in multiple cultures has been investigated using the SCM (see Fiske and Durante, 2016 , for a review). However, there is limited research on how stereotype content for general groups relate to stereotype content for subgroups with intersecting category memberships, which also limits our knowledge about how social categories are jointly related to stereotype content. The stereotype content for sexual minority groups has been found to be partly inverted compared to the content of stereotypes about the general gender groups women and men, such that the stereotype content for lesbian women is more similar to that of men in general, while the stereotype content for gay men is more similar to that of women in general 1 (see for instance, Blashill and Powlishta, 2009 ). However, the degree to which this represents an inversion of gender stereotypes, compared to an androgynous view of sexual minorities, is not clear. Furthermore, the degree to which this suggested inversion reflects proximity or distance to stereotype content for gender groups without specified sexual orientation has not been directly tested.

The current study, therefore, aims to provide an intersectional analysis of stereotype content for groups at the intersection of gender and sexual orientation. We expand upon previous research by including direct comparisons of stereotype content for general gender categories to that of intersecting subgroups, by including understudied sexual minority groups, and by testing stereotype content using both explicit and implicit measures.

The Intersection of Gender and Sexual Orientation

A multitude of studies have identified that women are stereotyped as high in communion but low in agency, while men are stereotyped as low in communion and high in agency (for reviews, see, e.g., Heilman, 2001 ; Wood and Eagly, 2010 ; Ellemers, 2018 ). Several studies within the SCM framework have found support for the predicted ambivalence of general gender stereotypes in different cultures (e.g., Fiske et al., 2002 ; Cuddy et al., 2009 , 2015 ; Asbrock, 2010 ; Bye et al., 2014 ). However, stereotype content related to gender varies over time ( Eagly et al., 2020 ) and across nations (see for instance, Diekman et al., 2005 ; Cuddy et al., 2015 ; Sendén et al., 2019 ) with regards to both degree of communion and agency. In Sweden, for instance, recent data on gender stereotype content indicate that men are indeed stereotyped as lower in communion compared to women, but that women and men are rated as equally agentic ( Sendén et al., 2019 ). Beyond culture and time, the content of gender stereotypes is further complicated by the connection between gender typicality and inferred sexual orientation.

Gender atypical behavior is used as a heuristic for classifying individuals as not heterosexual (see research on “gaydar,” e.g., Cox et al., 2016 ). In contrast, assertions of heterosexuality frequently make use of exaggerations of gender typical behavior, particularly for men ( Bosson et al., 2012 ; Davis-Delano and Morgan, 2016 ). Research on beliefs regarding gender inversion of characteristics associated with sexual minorities have found that homosexual women and men are seen as more similar to other-gender heterosexual groups than to their respective same gender group ( Kite and Deaux, 1987 ; Blashill and Powlishta, 2009 ), and that heterosexual groups are seen are more gender typical than homosexual or bisexual groups ( Ghavami and Peplau, 2018 ). However, this “inversion” does not mean that sexual minority groups are viewed as the same as other-gender heterosexual groups, but rather as different from both their own gender group and the other included gender group ( Blashill and Powlishta, 2009 ). In fact, homosexual women and men can be rated as equally masculine and feminine ( Clarke and Arnold, 2017 ) with comparable degrees of similarities to both same and other gender groups ( Ghavami and Peplau, 2018 ): suggesting an androgyny rather than gender inversion view of sexual minorities.

The typical SCM paradigm involves measuring stereotype content for a diverse sample of groups identified by participants as salient in a specific culture (see for instance, Fiske et al., 2002 ). Studies of stereotype content for sexual minority groups conducted in different cultures show different degrees of agency and communion included in cultural stereotypes regarding homosexual women and men, ranging from high on both dimensions (homosexual men in Norway; Bye et al., 2014 ) to low on both dimensions (homosexual men in Mexico; Durante et al., 2013 ). Findings from Australia ( Durante et al., 2013 ), Germany ( Eckes, 2002 ; Asbrock, 2010 ), Italy ( Brambilla et al., 2011 ), and the United States ( Fiske et al., 2002 ) show either medium levels of agency and communion included in the stereotypes about homosexual women and men, or partial gender inversion of stereotype content. Gay men have been more commonly mentioned in such group salience measures than lesbian women, potentially due to mechanisms of intersectional invisibility ( Purdie-Vaughns and Eibach, 2008 ), and bisexual women and men are completely absent. Studies specifically dedicated to measuring stereotype content for homosexual and bisexual women and men ( Vaughn et al., 2017 ), as well as heterosexual ditto ( Mize and Manago, 2018 ), are few in number. Comparisons between homosexual and bisexual women and men indicate either that bisexual groups form a cluster relatively low on both communion and agency ( Mize and Manago, 2018 ), or that ratings of communion follow a gendered (but inverted) pattern, while ratings of agency is lower for bisexual men than for remaining groups ( Vaughn et al., 2017 ). Looking not across but within sexual minorities also reveals diametrically different stereotype content for subgroups of lesbian women and gay men ( Clausell and Fiske, 2005 ; Brambilla et al., 2011 ).

Studies of social categories like gender can be fruitfully enriched by incorporating an intersectional framework, in which gender is not treated as an isolated factor of social categorization but rather a social positioning that gains meaning from a complex system of interrelations ( Crenshaw, 1989 ; McCall, 2005 ; Cole, 2009 ). In this spirit, it has long been suggested that sexuality plays an intrinsic role in constituting gender as a meaningful category (see Connell, 1987 ; Wittig, 1992b ; Butler, 2006 for a few influential examples). Gender as a binary structure relies on the existence of two groups with opposing qualities that complement each within heterosexuality, what Butler (2006) called the heterosexual matrix. An intersectional analysis that allows analysis of both how sexual minorities relate to general gender groups and how general gender groups depend on a specific sexual orientation for meaning therefore makes an investigation of the constitutive interplay of different dimensions of categorizations in relation to stereotype content possible. This has not been possible in the studies that have been reviewed here, so far, given that direct measures of general gender stereotypes have not been included. Instead, gender stereotypes have been assumed to conform to the pattern of women being stereotyped as low agency-high communion and men as high agency-low communion. To this end, the current research includes direct measures of general gender stereotypes in addition to measures of stereotype content for groups at the intersection of gender and sexual orientation. This study thus answers the call for a greater intersectional focus in psychological research on social groups ( Cole, 2009 ; Nicolas et al., 2017 ) with a quantitative focus ( Else-Quest and Hyde, 2015 ).

Implicit Measures of Stereotype Content

Beyond using trait rating scales, stereotype content can also be measured implicitly, something that has been called for as a future research direction within SCM ( Fiske, 2019 ). The most common implicit measure of associations between a target group and an attribute dimension is the Implicit Association Test (IAT; Greenwald et al., 1998 ). The IAT aims to measure the strength of the association between a target concept and an attribute dimension through reaction time latency ( Fazio and Olson, 2003 ). The association between the target concept and attribute dimension is given relative to a complementary target concept, e.g., the association between White-Good relative to Black-Good rather than simply the association strength between White-Good ( Greenwald et al., 1998 ). Similar to explicit stereotypes, women, compared to men, are more strongly implicitly associated to warmth ( Ebert et al., 2014 ). However, unlike explicit associations, participants of either gender implicitly associate their own gender more strongly with competence ( Ebert et al., 2014 ). Implicit gender stereotyping thus appear to follow the pattern of explicit gender stereotypes in that the stereotype for women contain more warmth/communion than that for men, while competence/agency is more variable (see for instance, Sendén et al., 2019 ; Eagly et al., 2020 ). To address the limitation that the IAT only measures relative associations, the Single-Category IAT (SC-IAT) was developed ( Karpinski and Steinman, 2006 ). For stereotype content at the intersection of gender and sexual orientation, the SC-IAT could provide a valuable insight into implicit associations between complex social groups without obvious complementary categories and stereotype content dimensions. While implicit attitudes toward homosexual and bisexual women and men have begun to become an object of study (for examples, see for instance, Steffens and Wagner, 2004 ; Morrison et al., 2010 ; Breen and Karpinski, 2013 ), there are to our knowledge no studies on implicit stereotype content in terms of communion and agency for sexual minorities using the SC-IAT. This research represents a first exploration on if there is a relationship between explicit and implicit stereotypes at the intersection of gender and sexual orientation, thus providing valuable information on the degree of automaticity in associations between the stereotype dimensions of communion and agency and intersectional groups.

Overview of the Current Study

The current research aimed to provide a description of stereotype content at the intersection of gender and sexual orientation, specifically for the genders women and men, and the sexual orientations heterosexuality, homosexuality, and bisexuality. To achieve this goal, two studies were conducted using an online community sample as well as a nationally representative sample. There are two main questions that this research informs: What is the gender stereotype content for groups at the intersection of gender and sexual orientation, and how does stereotype content for general gender categories relate to these subgroups?

Materials and Methods

Participants in both studies were randomly assigned to respond to one of the following eight target groups: women, men, heterosexual women, heterosexual men, homosexual women, homosexual men, bisexual women, and bisexual men. Sample sizes for each condition varied from 89 to 121 in Study 1 and from 45 to 57 in Study 2, exact sample sizes for all conditions can be found in Supplementary Table S1 .

The procedure for Study 1 consisted of participants rating their assigned group on communion and agency measures, followed by demographic items. For Study 2, participants first performed two SC-IATs (one for warmth and one for competence), and then followed the same procedure as in Study 1. Both studies were hosted on Qualtrics, 2 and no personal data were collected. The present research was carried out in accordance with the Swedish national guidelines on ethical research ( Swedish Research Council, 2017 ) and International Standards for Authors ( Wager and Kleinert, 2011 ). Participants were informed that their participation was voluntary and anonymous and that no personal information would be collected.

Participants

Participants were recruited during the spring of 2019 using advertising in various user groups on the social media site Facebook (e.g., in groups consisting of lay people with scientific interest, groups focused on specific hobbies, and groups intended for social interaction). A total of 824 participants completed the study with less than 20% missing values and make up the final sample. Participants used a free-text response to report gender and sexual orientation in order to avoid limiting the response options available (as recommended by Lindqvist et al., 2020 ), and the first author coded the responses into the categories found in Table 1 . Other demographics measured consisted of age and occupation, and can be found in Table 1 .

Table 1 . Sample demographics for samples 1 and 2.

For Study 2, a sample representative of the Swedish population in terms of age, binary gender, and regional location was recruited in June 2019 through a web panel hosted by Enkätfabriken. 3 A total of 424 participants completed the implicit measures, while 423 participants completed the explicit measures with less than 20% missing values. Complete demographics can be found in Table 1 along with information on demographics differences between samples 1 and 2, when applicable.

Agency/Communion Scale

Perceived agency and communion of each target group were measured using rating scales with traits representing each dimension. Participants were instructed to rate the target group according to how they believe society views the group (see e.g., Fiske et al., 2002 ). The scale ranged from 1 ( not at all ) to 5 ( a great deal ), and the traits were taken from both the warmth/competence literature (see for instance, Fiske et al., 2002 ) and the agency/communion literature ( Abele et al., 2016 ) due to the great overlap between the constructs ( Fiske, 2019 ). Translation into Swedish was performed by the first author and evaluated by the other authors. See Supplementary Table S2 for specific items used. Both the communion and the agency measure showed high internal reliability, α = 0.91 and α = 0.91, respectively.

Single Category IAT

The SC-IAT is a modification of the IAT ( Greenwald et al., 1998 ) that allows for testing of associations between a target category and an attribute category without the use of a comparison category ( Karpinski and Steinman, 2006 ). Two SC-IATs were programmed into Qualtrics using a modified version of the code provided by Carpenter et al. (2019) .

Participants completed two separate SC-IATs with the attribute categories warmth/cold and competence/incompetence, respectively. The SC-IATs were conducted in Swedish, and because there are no direct translations of the terms communion and agency, the terms warmth and competence were used as names for the attribute categories presented to participants. However, stimulus words for the dimensions included words related to the all facets of the larger concepts of communion and agency. The stimulus words used for the target groups followed recommendations from Steffens et al. (2008) and consisted of synonyms for the target groups, see Supplementary Table S3 for all stimuli words, and Supplementary Table S4 for a complete list of group name synonyms.

Participants completed the SC-IATs in a randomized order, with the order of the different potential placements of target groups and attribute categories randomized between left and right placement on the screen. Participants first completed a practice block consisting of 24 trials followed by a critical block of 60 trials. This was repeated a total of four times for each possible combination of target group and attribute category. Participants were instructed to sort the words appearing in the middle of the screen to one of the three categories available as fast as possible using the “e” and the “i” key. If an incorrect classification was performed, a red X appeared on the screen for 300 ms and the participant had to correct their classification before the test continued. See Figure 1 for an example of one trial.

Figure 1 . Trial from the Single-Category IAT (SC-IAT) comparing associations to bisexual women and warmth to associations between bisexual women and cold. In this permutation, bisexual women are paired with warmth, and in the comparison permutation bisexual women are paired with cold. Participants completed the SC-IAT in Swedish.

After performing the SC-IATs, participants rated their target group’s perceived agency and communion using identical rating scales as in Study 1, which displayed high internal reliability ( α = 0.95 and 0.91, respectively).

The potential effect of participant gender was tested but was not significant in any analyses and is therefore excluded from reporting. Data analysis was conducted using R version 3.6.2 ( R Core Team, 2019 ). ANOVAs were conducted using Type III sum of squares through the car package ( Fox and Weisberg, 2019 ), bivariate confidence intervals were calculate using the package jocre ( Pallmann, 2017 ), and split-half reliabilities for the SC-IATs were calculated using the package multicon ( Sherman, 2015 ). All pairwise comparisons were performed using a Tukey HSD correction for multiple comparisons unless otherwise stated.

There was no significant correlation between ratings of agency and communion, r = − 0.05, p = 0.16, and descriptive data by group for both outcome variables can be found in Table 2 . Two ANOVAs were performed to analyze differences in communion and agency based on group gender and group sexual orientation. There was a significant interaction effect between group gender (women, men) and group sexual orientation (none listed, heterosexual, homosexual, and bisexual) for both communion, F (3,816) = 83.93, p < 0.001, η p 2 = 0.24, and agency, F (3,816) = 108.62, p < 0.001, η p 2 = 0.29.

Table 2 . Descriptive data for communion and agency by target group for Study 1.

Group differences based on pairwise comparisons for the interaction effect on communion are shown in Table 2 . There was gender stereotype congruence for the general gender categories as well as the heterosexual categories: i.e., “women” were rated as more communal than “men” ( d = 1.76), and heterosexual women were rated as more communal than heterosexual men ( d = 1.48). “Women” and heterosexual women did not significantly differ from each other ( d = 0.06) and were both rated as more communal than all other categories ( ds < 1.76, > 0.51). For non-heterosexual categories, the pattern of gender stereotypes was reversed: homosexual men and bisexual men were rated as more communal than homosexual women and bisexual women, respectively ( ds = 0.65 and 0.58).

Group differences based on pairwise comparisons for the interaction effect on agency are shown in Table 2 . There was gender stereotype congruence for the general gender categories as well as the heterosexual categories: i.e., “men” were rated as more agentic than “women” were ( d = 1.83), and heterosexual men were rated as more agentic than heterosexual women were ( d = 1.11). “Men” were rated as more agentic than all other categories ( ds < 1.83, > 0.54), except heterosexual men ( d = 0.29). Heterosexual men were rated as more agentic than all remaining categories except homosexual women ( d = 0.20). For non-heterosexual categories, the pattern of gender stereotypes was partially reversed. Homosexual women were rated as more agentic than homosexual men ( d = 1.37), but bisexual women were not rated as significantly more agentic than bisexual men ( d = 0.41).

Paired t -tests were performed to determine intragroup differences in communion and agency, analysis details of which can be found in Supplementary Table S4 . The following groups were rated as more communal than agentic: “women,” heterosexual women, homosexual men, and bisexual men. “Men,” heterosexual men, homosexual women, and bisexual women were rated as more agentic than communal.

Finally, the communion and agency ratings for each group were mapped into a two-dimensional space in order to investigate both how the groups compare to each other and how they place in the SCM framework of ambivalent stereotypes. To give an estimate for the relation between groups in the bivariate space, a standard bivariate confidence region for each group’s mean value of agency and communion was calculated (see Chew, 1966 ; Pallmann and Jaki, 2017 for specific method). As can be seen in Figure 2 , the groups ranged from high agency-low communion to low agency-high communion with no groups placing in the high-high or low-low quadrant. There was an overlap between the confidence regions for the following pairs: “men” and heterosexual men, “women” and heterosexual women, heterosexual men and homosexual women, and homosexual men and bisexual men. The two bisexual categories placed closest to the middle of the map, and as such displayed no notable gender inversion.

Figure 2 . Mean ratings of agency and communion by target group for Study 1. Ellipses represent the 95% bivariate confidence region around the multivariate mean for each group. The axes have been truncated for clarity; full range of both scales is 1–5.

Study 1 showed that gender stereotypes in this sample were ambivalent and complementary, in terms of both communion and agency: “women” were stereotyped as high in communion but lower in agency and “men” were stereotyped as high in agency but lower in communion. This finding is in line with previous studies within an SCM paradigm (e.g., Fiske et al., 2002 ; Cuddy et al., 2009 , 2015 ; Asbrock, 2010 ; Bye et al., 2014 ), but stands in contrast to previous data from Sweden, which showed no difference in the degree of agency in stereotypes about women and men ( Sendén et al., 2019 ). One reason for this discrepancy could be that the studies have used different participant instructions, asking for cultural vs. personal estimations, respectively. Compared to cultural stereotypes, personal stereotypes have been shown to be higher in the depreciated dimension for groups with ambivalent stereotype content (e.g., communion for men), but not differ in terms of the higher rated dimension (e.g., agency for men; Kotzur et al., 2020 ). It is unclear, however, if this difference is due to social desirability concerns or a genuine discrepancy between cultural and personal stereotypes. Compared to Sendén et al. (2019) who asked about personal views on which traits women or men were likely to display, the current study only partly follows this pattern: personal stereotypes about “women” contain higher degrees of agency than cultural stereotypes, but personal stereotypes about “men” do not seem to be higher in communion than cultural stereotypes.

When sexual orientation is specified, stereotype content for sexual minority groups differs from the stereotype content for their respective general gender group, but this is not the case for heterosexual groups. It thus appears that general gender stereotypes only apply to heterosexual women and men. A similar pattern has been shown for the intersection of gender and ethnicity, such that stereotypes about women and men only matched those about White women and men, while stereotypes about Black people only matched those of Black men ( Ghavami and Peplau, 2013 ).

The way that stereotype content for sexual minority groups differs from general gender stereotypes shows a partial gender inversion. As stated, all sexual minority groups show a difference to both the gender congruent and gender incongruent general gender group, so it is not the case that for instance, the stereotype for homosexual men is the same as that for women in general. However, all sexual minority groups showed a greater similarity to the gender incongruent general gender group than to the gender congruent one. Homosexual and bisexual men showed a similar degree of agency as heterosexual women, and homosexual and bisexual women showed a similar degree of communion as heterosexual men. Homosexual and bisexual men differed from heterosexual women in terms of communion, and while bisexual women differed from heterosexual men in terms of agency, homosexual women did not. As an overall pattern, this data indicate that sexual minorities receive lower ratings for the gender congruent dimension (communion for women and agency for men), but the corresponding increase in the gender incongruent dimension is not comparable in size to that of heterosexual groups. That is, bisexual women are as low in communion as heterosexual men, but not as high in agency. The exception to this pattern is homosexual women who were indeed seen as similar to heterosexual men in terms of both communion and agency, but still differed from men in general. These results thus fall somewhere in between a gender inversion (e.g., Kite and Deaux, 1987 ; Blashill and Powlishta, 2009 ) and an androgyny interpretation of stereotypes about sexual minorities ( Clarke and Arnold, 2017 ; Ghavami and Peplau, 2018 ).

Looking within sexual minority groups, gender seems to be the organizing factor: homosexual men and bisexual men cluster together, while homosexual women and bisexual women are similar in communion but somewhat different in agency. This differs somewhat from previous studies that have found that stereotype content for homosexual women and men are more similar to gender incongruent heterosexual groups, while stereotype content for bisexual women and men cluster together to a greater degree ( Vaughn et al., 2017 ; Mize and Manago, 2018 ). A key difference between the current study and previous studies that have included bisexual groups is that ratings in the current study are conducted completely between-groups, whereas previous studies have been either completely within-participant designs ( Vaughn et al., 2017 ) or had a between-within design ( Mize and Manago, 2018 ). Collecting completely independent stereotype content ratings thus appear to indicate that gender identity and sexual orientation dynamically influence stereotype content, such that gender identity organizes stereotype content within sexual minority groups, while sexual orientation organizes stereotype content within gender groups. This pattern is consistent with an interpretation of gender and sexual orientation being co-constitutive in terms of associated traits rather than two independent categories.

There was a significant, positive correlation between ratings of agency and communion, r = 0.44, p < 0.001, and descriptive data by group for both outcome variables can be found in Table 3 . Two ANOVAs were performed to analyze group differences in communion and agency based on group gender and group sexual orientation. There was a significant interaction effect between group gender (women, men) and group sexual orientation (none listed, heterosexual, homosexual, and bisexual) for both communion, F (3,415) = 14.27, p < 0.001, η p 2 = 0.09, and agency, F (3,415) = 7.95, p < 0.001, η p 2 = 0.06.

Table 3 . Descriptive data for communion and agency by target group for Study 2.

Group differences based on pairwise comparisons for the interaction effect on communion are shown in Table 3 . There was gender stereotype congruence for the general gender categories as well as the heterosexual categories: i.e., “women” were rated as more communal than “men” ( d = 1.20), and heterosexual women were rated as more communal than heterosexual men ( d = 0.87). “Women” were rated as more communal than all other categories ( ds < 1.28, > 0.88), except heterosexual women ( d = 0.27). Heterosexual women were rated as significantly more communal than bisexual women and men ( d = 0.86 and 0.70).

Group differences based on pairwise comparisons for the interaction effect on agency are shown in Table 3 . There was gender stereotype congruence for the general gender categories: i.e., “men” were rated as more agentic than “women” ( d = 0.77). “Men” were also rated as more agentic than heterosexual women, homosexual men, bisexual women, and bisexual men ( ds = 0.66, 1.26, 1.15, and 1.31). Heterosexual men significantly differed from homosexual men, bisexual women, and bisexual men ( ds = 0.68, 0.64, and 0.74).

Paired t -tests were performed to determine intragroup differences in communion and agency, analysis details of which can be found in Supplementary Table S4 . The following groups were rated as more communal than agentic: “women,” heterosexual women, homosexual men, and bisexual men. “Men” and heterosexual men were rated as more agentic than communal. There was no significant difference in agency and communion for homosexual or bisexual women.

Finally, the communion and agency ratings for each group were mapped into a two-dimensional space. As can be seen in Figure 3 , the overlap between groups is greater in Study 2 than in Study 1 and in general the groups place closer to the middle of the map. However, the category of “women” still only overlapped with heterosexual women, and “men” only overlapped with heterosexual men and homosexual women. Remaining groups all showed some two-dimensional overlap with each other.

Figure 3 . Mean ratings of agency and communion by target group for Study 2. Ellipses represent the 95% bivariate confidence region around the multivariate mean for each group. The axes have been truncated for clarity; full range of both scales is 1–5.

To test the difference in ratings of communion and agency between samples, two (group gender: women, men) × 4 (sexual orientation: none listed, heterosexual, homosexual, and bisexual) × 2 (sample: Study 1, Study 2) ANOVAs were conducted. There were significant three way interaction effects for both communion, F (3, 1,231) = 6.44, p < 0.001, η p 2 = 0.02, and agency, F (3, 1,231) = 16.20, p < 0.001, η p 2 = 0.04. Pairwise comparisons between samples showed that ratings of communion was higher in Study 2 compared to Study 1 for “men,” heterosexual men, and homosexual women ( p s < 0.01). For agency, ratings were higher in Study 2 compared to Study 1 for “women” and heterosexual women ( p s < 0.001).

Data cleaning of reactions times for the SC-IAT was performed following recommendations from Greenwald et al. (2003) and Karpinski and Steinman (2006) . Participants with more than 10% of responses faster than 300 ms or over 20% error rate were excluded, as were trials slower than 10,000 ms. Participants with a mean reaction time between two and three SDs above the target group mean were excluded as outliers. Details about number of participants and trials excluded per SC-IAT can be found in Supplementary Table S6 .

Reliabilities for the SC-IATs were calculated for the response times for warmth-cold and competence-incompetence separately for each target group. Split-half reliability was calculated from 1,000 split-half correlations and averaged between groups. The internal reliability for both the warmth-cold SC-IAT and the competence-incompetence SC-IAT showed reliability correlations comparable to previous research using SC-IAT measures, r = 0.75 ( SD = 0.15) and r = 0.82 ( SD = 0.14), respectively (see Greenwald and Lai, 2020 for comparable reliability correlations).

Single-Category IAT results were calculated in the form of D -scores based on the scoring algorithm developed in Greenwald et al. (2003) with the specific SC-IAT method described in Karpinski and Steinman (2006) . For the Warmth-Cold SC-IAT, participant average response times for the block Group + Warmth was subtracted from averages for Group + Cold. This value was then divided by the pooled SD for all response times for both blocks to create a warmth-cold D -score with positive values indicating faster associations to warmth than to cold. The same procedure was followed for the Competence-Incompetence SC-IAT. A stereotype content D -score was then created by subtracting the Warmth-Cold D -score from the Competence-Incompetence D -score. Positive values of the stereotype content D -score indicate faster associations to competence (relative to incompetence) than to warmth (relative to cold). Descriptive data for D -scores divided by target group can be found in Table 3 and descriptive data for reaction times can be found in the Supplementary Table S7 . As can be seen in Table 4 from the 95% CIs for the group mean D -scores, all groups except “men” and homosexual men showed a stronger association to warmth compared to cold, while all groups except homosexual men and bisexual men showed a stronger association to competence compared to incompetence. No groups showed a stronger association to the negative dimensions (cold and incompetence) compared to the positive dimensions (warmth and competence). The only group whose CI for the mean stereotype D -score did not include zero was the group “men”; indicating that they elicited comparatively stronger associations to competence than to warmth.

Table 4 . Means, SDs, and 95% CIs for Warmth-Cold, Competence-Incompetence, and stereotype content D -scores by target group.

There was a significant, positive correlation between D -scores for Warmth-Cold and Competence-Incompetence ( r = 0.20, p < 0.001), but no significant correlations between explicit ratings of communion or agency and either D -score ( r = −0.07 and −0.02 for Warmth-Cold and r = −0.01 and 0.03 for Competence-Incompetence, p s > 0.57).

Three 2 (group gender: woman, man) × 4 (sexual orientation: none listed, heterosexual, homosexual, bisexual) ANOVAs were conducted to analyze differences in D -scores for Warmth-Cold, Competence-Incompetence and Stereotype Content based on target group. The effects of participant gender and version order on D -scores were tested to ensure that no unintended influence had occurred. Neither version order nor participant gender had a significant influence on any of the D -scores and will therefore not be reported.

For Warmth-Cold D -scores, there was a significant effect of group gender, F (1,359) = 10.46, p = 0.001, η p 2 = 0.03. There was no significant main effect of group sexual orientation, F (3,359) = 1.15, p = 0.21. There was however an interaction effect of group gender and sexual orientation that bordered significance, F (3,359) = 2.57, p = 0.05, η p 2 = 0.02. The nearly significant interaction effect was a result of a significant difference in Warmth-Cold D -scores between the groups “women” and “men” ( M diff = 15, p = 0.03), and only between these two groups. The difference indicates that the group “women” were associated significantly more strongly with warmth (relative to cold) than the group “men”.

For Competence-Incompetence D -scores, there was no significant effect of neither group gender, F (1,371) = 0.49, p = 0.48, sexual orientation, F (3,371) = 0.51, p = 0.68, nor a significant interaction between the two, F (3,371) = 0.88, p = 0.45.

For the combined Stereotype Content D -scores, there was a significant effect of group gender, F (1,343) = 4.19, p = 0.04, η p 2 = 0.01. There was no significant main effect of group sexual orientation, F (3,343) = 0.78, p = 0.51. There was a significant interaction effect between group gender and sexual orientation, F (3,343) = 3.72, p = 0.02, η p 2 = 0.03. The interaction effect of gender and sexual orientation was a result of a group difference between “men” and bisexual men ( M diff = −0.21, p = 0.03), and only these groups. This difference indicates that bisexual men were seen as having a greater difference in warmth (relative to cold) and competence (relative to incompetence) associations than men in general. As can be seen in Table 3 , this was driven by “men” having a stronger association with competence while bisexual men had a stronger association with warmth.

Study 2 showed concurrent results with Study 1 regarding the presence of ambivalent explicit stereotype content for “women” and “men,” as well as regarding the overlap between stereotype content for general gender groups and gender congruent heterosexual groups. However, the degree to which stereotype content for sexual minority groups differ from heterosexual groups was smaller in Study 2 compared to Study 1. There was no significant difference for neither communion nor agency between sexual minority groups nor between sexual minority groups and heterosexual men. Heterosexual women received higher communion ratings than sexual minorities and heterosexual men, but did not differ from these groups in terms of agency.

Stereotype content for sexual minority groups differed less from stereotype content for heterosexual groups in Study 2 than in Study 1. Homosexual men, bisexual men, and bisexual women received lower ratings of agency than heterosexual men did, but did not differ from heterosexual women. Bisexual women received lower ratings of communion than heterosexual women did, whereas homosexual women did not differ significantly from either heterosexual group in terms of either dimension. The overall pattern of the content of stereotypes about sexual minority groups thus showed very little gender inversion compared to the findings of Study 1. However, this is not a result of differences between studies in measured stereotype content for sexual minority groups but rather for general gender groups and heterosexual groups. Sexual minority groups in fact showed only one difference between the two samples: homosexual women were viewed as higher in agency in Study 2 compared to Study 1. For the remaining three groups stereotype content appeared rather constant. Instead, general gender groups and heterosexual groups received higher ratings in Study 2 compared to Study 1 on their respective depreciated dimensions. With ratings of communion and agency being more similar for the general gender groups and the heterosexual groups, the overlap with the static sexual minority groups naturally increased. However, even with these increases in agency and communion for “women” and “men,” respectively, the stereotype content for the general gender groups was still only concurrent with that of same gender heterosexual groups.

Group differences in implicit associations to stereotype dimensions were scarce, and did not follow the same patterns as explicit stereotype content. “Women” were associated more strongly with warmth than “men,” and bisexual men were associated more strongly with warmth than competence compared to “men.” However, implicit associations between target group and warmth only differed for the general gender groups, and was not present for any of the sexual orientation subgroups. Furthermore, there was no significant correlation between implicit and explicit measures of stereotype content. That “women” were more strongly associated with warmth (relative to both cold and competence) than “men” supports previous findings of an implicit women-warmth association ( Ebert et al., 2014 ). However, the current study could not find the own-gender bias for implicit associations to competence (i.e., that women associate women more strongly with competence and men associate men more strongly with competence), which has previously been reported ( Ebert et al., 2014 ).

Unlike previous research using the IAT to measure implicit associations to warmth and competence, the current study could not find any indication of ambivalent associations where groups are either associated with warmth or competence (cf. Carlsson and Björklund, 2010 ; Lindqvist et al., 2017 ), or the presence of implicit associations with an overall negative valence (cf. Rohmer and Louvet, 2012 , 2018 ). Instead, participants showed overall stronger associations between the included groups and the positive rather than the negative dimensions, with the exception of sexual minority men who did not show a differential association between dimensions. One possible reason for this overall stronger association with positive dimensions could be the unbalanced valence of the paired dimensions in each SC-IAT. That is, it is possible that groups are more strongly associated with either warmth or competence without necessarily being associated with their respective negative counterparts. Previous research have shown that dimensions with unbalanced valence can be used to measure more negative implicit associations for the groups “the poor” and “the disabled” ( Rohmer and Louvet, 2012 , 2018 ; Lindqvist et al., 2017 ), indicating that the use of stimuli with negative valence should not in itself present an issue if there are genuinely negative implicit associations present. However, it may be the case that attitudes toward groups at the intersection of gender and sexual orientation influence implicit association to a greater degree than they do explicit measures of cultural stereotype content. Such a potential effect of attitude has been found for implicit associations between warmth/competence and housewives/businesswomen when measured with the lexical decision test, a different implicit measure of associations than the IAT. Women have been found to have stronger associations between businesswomen and positive terms in general regardless of their connection to warmth or competence, while men have stronger associations between housewives and positive terms ( Wade and Brewer, 2006 ). That is, participants’ personal positive attitudes to the target groups in the current study could have resulted in valence and not attribute dimension guiding their implicit associations.

General Discussion

The current findings showed that the stereotype content for the general gender categories “women” and “men” was similar to that of the specific categories heterosexual women and men, while being significantly different from that of homo- or bisexual women and men. As regards the gender inversion theory of sexual orientation ( Kite and Deaux, 1987 ), the content of stereotypes about homosexual and bisexual categories were less gender stereotypical than the content of stereotypes about the general gender categories and the heterosexual categories. However, there was still a significant difference between stereotype content for the general gender categories and the corresponding gender-incongruent homosexual and bisexual category for both communion and agency. This indicates that the content of stereotypes about sexual minorities is not so much gender inversed as generally more androgynous than that of heterosexual counterparts.

Explicit stereotype content for the sexual minority groups was similar for both the community sample and the nationally representative sample, but stereotype content for general gender groups and heterosexual groups differed. Implicit associations to warmth and competence showed a stronger association between “women” and warmth, compared to “men” and warmth. However, there were no group differences found in terms of implicit associations to competence.

Early studies within an SCM framework that included sexual minority groups found that the stereotype content for the groups homosexual men and women was neutral rather than gender inversed ( Fiske et al., 2002 ; Asbrock, 2010 ; Brambilla et al., 2011 ). This lack of ambivalent stereotype content connected to homosexual groups was suggested to be a result of contrasting stereotype content for salient subgroups of homosexual women and men leading to stereotype content ratings of medium agency and communion ( Clausell and Fiske, 2005 ; Brambilla et al., 2011 ). Degree of gender conformity or gender non-conformity seems to be an organizing feature in perceptions of subgroups of lesbian women and gay men ( Geiger et al., 2006 ; McCutcheon and Morrison, 2021 ), which could be one reason as why to subgroups of sexual minorities can be associated with contrasting stereotype content. However, the current studies find no indication that contrasting stereotype content for subgroups influenced the overall stereotype content of sexual minority groups, and instead falls in line with previous findings regarding the partial gender inversion of the content of stereotypes about homosexual individuals. Furthermore, Mize and Manago (2018) found that the gender inversion of stereotype content associated with sexual minorities might be more pronounced for sexual minority men than for sexual minority women. This was indicated by the presence of an overlap between participant ratings of both communion and agency for heterosexual women and homosexual men, whereas only ratings of communion overlapped for heterosexual men and homosexual women. However, the current research tells a different story with homosexual men being rated significantly lower regarding communion that heterosexual women in Study 1 but not in Study 2, while ratings of homosexual women did not differ from ratings of heterosexual men in terms of communion of agency in either study. As evidenced by these conflicting findings, sexual orientation and gender has a dynamic rather than simple relationship, and future research is needed to investigate how notions of gender inversion influences societal treatment of both sexual minority women and men.

The content of stereotypes for bisexual groups was more similar to the stereotype content for their respective gender congruent homosexual counterparts than to heterosexual or general groups, indicating that there may be a higher degree of gender atypicality in stereotype content for non-heterosexual groups in general and not exclusively for homosexual groups. This view of bisexual groups as more gender typical than homosexual groups, but less gender typical than heterosexual groups, coincides with findings from the United States regarding perceptions of bisexual women and men ( Vaughn et al., 2017 ; Ghavami and Peplau, 2018 ; Mize and Manago, 2018 ). Note also that neither the stereotype content for bisexual women nor for bisexual men was low in communion or agency, meaning that stereotypes about these groups do not fall in the low-low corner of the SCM map that is associated with harmful behavioral responses from society ( Cuddy et al., 2008 ). In fact, the lowest stereotype content dimension for bisexual women and men, respectively (communion and agency), was not significantly different from that of gender incongruent heterosexual groups. Recent national data from the United States show a similar pattern of a shift from very negative attitudes toward bisexuality ( Herek, 2002 ) to generally neutral attitudes ( Dodge et al., 2016 ). Findings from Germany show that attitudes in the general public were neutral with regards to bisexuality, even though subgroups of the population did hold negative attitudes ( Steffens and Wagner, 2004 ). One potential reason for these differences in attitudes toward bisexual individuals could be that participants have different views of what bisexuality entails. There is a common prejudice in relation to bisexuality that bisexuality is not a valid sexual orientation unto itself, but rather an expression of confusion from people who are “actually” homosexual or heterosexual ( Israel and Mohr, 2004 ; Hubbard and de Visser, 2015 ; Burke and LaFrance, 2016b ; Morgenroth et al., 2021 ). Whether or not a bisexual person is seen as latently homosexual or heterosexual depends on their gender, such that bisexual women are seen as latently heterosexual and bisexual men are seen as latently homosexual ( Flanders and Hatfield, 2013 ; Mize and Manago, 2018 ; Morgenroth et al., 2021 ). Because the stereotype content reported in the current study for bisexual groups was closer to that of gender congruent homosexual groups for both bisexual women and men, there is some indication that bisexual men were viewed as latently homosexual, but no indication that bisexual women were viewed are latently heterosexual.

In general, the current study did not find a clear relationship between explicit and implicit measures of stereotype content, except for the finding of stronger implicit association between “women” and warmth compared to “men.” This further supports the women-warmth association previously found ( Ebert et al., 2014 ). However, this was not due to any specific subgroup of women being more strongly associated with warmth, but rather shows that implicit warmth associations to the general group “women” may not be present when sexual orientation is specified. A lack of general warmth associations with subgroups of women has also previously been found in relation to the groups “homemakers” and “businesswomen,” where participant gender instead made either group associated more strongly with overall positive attributes ( Wade and Brewer, 2006 ). Participant gender did not have such an effect in the current study, nor did it influence implicit associations to competence in the pattern of own-gender bias that has been previously identified ( Ebert et al., 2014 ). Furthermore, unlike previous studies using the IAT to study ambivalent stereotype content ( Carlsson and Björklund, 2010 ; Lindqvist et al., 2017 ), our data shows no significant difference in implicit associations with warmth compared to competence. One potential reason for the discrepancy in studies of ambivalent implicit associations could be the structure of the group under investigation. In the current study, the target groups were subgroups of the larger groups of women/men and heterosexual/homosexual/bisexual individuals (in addition to the two general gender groups “women”/“men”). These groups are all made up of a combination of two social categories and were named as such in the materials presented to participants (e.g., homosexual woman). This differs from the group structure previously studied in regards to ambivalent implicit associations that have included groups with only one named social identity: lawyers/preschool teachers ( Carlsson and Björklund, 2010 ), women/men ( Ebert et al., 2014 ), and homemakers/businesswomen ( Wade and Brewer, 2006 ). Using noun forms of groups names in this way has been found to heighten the salience of group membership, compared to using adjective forms ( Graf et al., 2012 ). It is, therefore, possible that implicit associations to sexual minority groups named using nouns (e.g., lesbian) as opposed to adjectives (e.g., homosexual woman) would show a pattern of ambivalent implicit associations more similar to those found using explicit measures.

Limitations

The current study included a sample recruited through social media, a vector of recruitment that is still relatively unstudied. There has been some concern raised that social media recruitment is particularly vulnerable to self-selection effects ( Thornton et al., 2016 ), which could be one reason why there was greater polarization of evaluations in the social media sample compared to the online panel sample. It is worth noting that the use of social media recruitment provides access to more diverse participants than a student sample does ( Hays et al., 2015 ), which was also the case in the current study in relation to sexual orientation of participants. However, even with a more diverse sample, the current study did not include a sufficient number of homosexual and bisexual participants to conduct analyses of potential intersectional ingroup effects. Future studies on stereotype content should investigate further whether or not stereotype content, and particularly implicit stereotype content, differs between members of different intersections of gender and sexual orientation. This may be particularly crucial for implicit stereotype content, since previous research has found implicit ingroup preferences related to sexual orientation ( Steffens, 2008 ; Anselmi et al., 2013 ; Steffens et al., 2013 ).

To capitalize on theoretical developments identifying the person perception dimensions warmth and competence as parallels to communion and agency ( Fiske, 2019 ), the trait rating scales used in the current study was substantially more extensive than those used in the previous SCM literature. Traits included covered all relevant facets of agency and communion ( Abele et al., 2016 ), and showed high internal reliability. However, the scales do need to undergo dedicated psychometric testing to further determine their degree of construct validity.

A methodological limitation of using the SC-IAT online is a lack of control over the study environment. Since the SC-IAT requires a high degree of concentration from participants, the potential for environmental distractions to influence performance is considerable, and may be one contributing factor to the discrepancy between explicit and implicit stereotype content. A methodological contribution of the current approach; however, is the effective participant recruitment that potentially lessened the influence of self-selection biases, in that it became less strenuous for participants to complete the test compared to in-person testing.

Suggestions for Future Research

In the current study, bisexual women and men showed neither high nor low degrees of either stereotype dimension. Previous research into stereotypes about bisexual people have found a lack of knowledge among heterosexual individuals about traits associated with bisexual women and men ( Zivony and Lobel, 2014 ), while homosexual and bisexual individuals report stereotypes closer to those about homosexual groups ( Burke and LaFrance, 2016a , b ). The need for further study into determining factors for stereotype content in relation to bisexual groups is not limited to perceiver sexual orientation, but also includes salience of the assumed gender of sexual partners ( Zivony and Saguy, 2018 ) and the impact of essentialist views on sexuality ( Hubbard and de Visser, 2015 ). This can provide further information on how gender is given meaning by a perceiver depending on the interplay of gender, sexual orientation, gender of partner, and perceiver attitudes.

A further avenue of inquiry is to investigate how stereotypes at the intersection of gender and sexual orientation relate to other suggested dimensions of stereotype content. A competing model to the SCM is the Agency, Beliefs, Communion (ABC) model of stereotypes. The ABC model suggests that the key dimensions used in group evaluation are agency/socioeconomic success and conservative-progressive beliefs, while communion is an emergent property of a group’s perceived agency ( Koch et al., 2016 ). Available research on sexual minority groups using all three of these dimensions indicate that lesbian women, gay men, and “bisexuals” are all stereotyped as low in agency and high on progressive beliefs. Ratings of communion differ between studies samples, with “bisexuals” receiving low ratings, gay men receiving high ratings, and lesbian women shifting between the two ( Koch et al., 2016 ). Available studies on the ABC model utilize the same paradigm as research within the SCM paradigm, in which only groups identified as particularly culturally salient are included (see e.g., Koch et al., 2016 , 2020 ). There is therefore a distinct lack of dedicated research on how the additional dimension of conservative-progressive beliefs relate to stereotype content at the intersection of gender and sexual orientation that future research should rectify.

Due to the changing nature of stereotype content in response to societal developments (see for instance, Diekman and Eagly, 2000 ; Hentschel et al., 2019 ; Sendén et al., 2019 ; Eagly et al., 2020 ), there is a need to conduct ongoing studies into stereotype content. The current study, therefore, provides insight into the current conceptualization of the dynamic relation between gendered attributes and sexual orientations in Sweden: a snapshot rather than a definitive image. Furthermore, the use of multiple forms of measurement in studies on stereotype content can provide greater insight into the limits of the concept under study and sampling others than student populations can give a more general view of stereotype content. Future studies on implicit associations would benefit from using several types of implicit tests to investigate if the lack of differential implicit associations in the current study is a methodological artifact or due to the complexity of associations.

A final avenue for future research is to investigate further what the implications are of intersectional invisibility and hypervisibility in terms of stereotype content. Intersectional invisibility has been linked to several negative consequences (e.g., lack of recognition or resources), but it could also potentially have beneficial effects in certain contexts (e.g., being less of a target of direct discrimination; Purdie-Vaughns and Eibach, 2008 ). Similarly, the hypervisibility of being a prototypical member of a marginalized group, for instance, a gay man, brings with it negative consequences (e.g., higher risk of legal discrimination), but also some benefits (e.g., higher likelihood to reach a leader position within the marginalized group; Purdie-Vaughns and Eibach, 2008 ). Research on recruitment for leadership positions has found either that lesbian women face a higher degree of discrimination in recruitment than gay men do ( Fasoli and Hegarty, 2019 ), that lesbian women and gay men face equal amounts of discrimination ( Fasoli et al., 2017 ), or that lesbian women and gay men are as equally likely to be hired as their heterosexual counterparts ( Niedlich and Steffens, 2015 ). Moreover, gay men who display gender non-conformity have been evaluated less positively as leaders than gender conforming gay men ( de Cristofaro et al., 2020 ; Salvati et al., 2021 ). We have found no similar research on the effect on leadership potential of gender conformity of lesbian women. However, both lesbian women and gay men have been rated as respectively higher in task competence and social skills in a recruitment situation than heterosexual women and men, but this high competence in gender non-stereotypical skills did not lead to higher hireability judgments ( Niedlich and Steffens, 2015 ). Beyond leadership, correspondence studies on recruitment discrimination show that lesbian women and gay men, compared to heterosexual women and men, have generally lower chances of receiving an interview invitation following a job application, and this bias has a gendered dimension. Lesbian women face particular discrimination in professions with majority women employees, while gay men face particular discrimination in professions with majority men employees ( Ahmed et al., 2013 ; Drydakis, 2015 ). Furthermore, sexual minority individuals who exhibit higher degrees of gender non-conformity are more likely to have experienced prejudiced events throughout their lifetime ( Thoma et al., 2021 ), and are more likely to be met with more negative attitudes from both heterosexual ( Cohen et al., 2009 ) and homosexual individuals ( Salvati et al., 2018 ). From this research, it is clear that the perceived gender inversion of sexual minority groups has real and negative consequences for the lives of sexual minority individuals, and that sexual minority individuals who are seen as gender non-conforming are particularly subjected to societal discrimination. There is thus a clear need for further research on the implications of differing or overlapping stereotype content in relation to general social groups.

Concluding Remarks

Intersectional invisibility ( Purdie-Vaughns and Eibach, 2008 ) of individuals with more than one subordinate group identity has previously been found in relation to the intersection of gender and ethnicity ( Ghavami and Peplau, 2013 ). The current study extended these findings to the intersection of gender and sexual orientation by showing that stereotype content for “women” and “men” only overlaps with that of heterosexual women and men, but not with that of subgroups that do not conform to a heteronormative ideology. This relation between general gender categories and heterosexual categories invites us to consider how gender and sexual orientation rely upon each other. Consider the term “gender inversion” used throughout the literature (and this article) to discuss the stereotype content of sexual minorities. What does this term imply about the relation that these groups have to gender as a binary structure, are lesbian and bisexual women not women and are gay and bisexual men not men? Speaking directly to this point, Wittig (1992a , p. 13) stated that “The refusal to become (or to remain) heterosexual always meant to refuse to become a man or a woman, consciously or not.” The results of the current study support the notion that without heterosexuality, gender loses much of its established meaning. In the case of bisexual groups, the lack of a clear gender of attraction further seems to rip gender from its moorings, denying the guidance that is present for homosexual groups in how to “invert” gendered expectations. Investigating how gender stereotype content relates to sexual orientation subgroups thus identifies the organizing role that heterosexuality plays in structuring gender as expressed in the current binary gender system.

Data Availability Statement

The raw data supporting the conclusions of this article will be made available by the authors, without undue reservation.

Ethics Statement

Ethical review and approval was not required for the study on human participants in accordance with the local legislation and institutional requirements. The patients/participants provided their written informed consent to participate in this study.

Author Contributions

AK conceptualized the idea, collected the data, performed the statistical analyses, and wrote the manuscript. AL and FB contributed actively in the designing and planning of the studies, interpretation and discussion of results, and in revising the manuscript. All authors contributed to the article and approved the submitted version.

This work was supported by a grant from the foundation Helge Ax:son Johnsons stiftelse (grant number F19-0486). The funds for the open access publication fee for this article were provided jointly by Lund University Article Processing Charges Fund and the Department of Psychology at Lund University.

Conflict of Interest

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

Supplementary Material

The Supplementary Material for this article can be found online at: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.713839/full#supplementary-material

1. ^ A note on language use is appropriate here. The current recommendations from the APA are to avoid the term “homosexual” women and men in favor of the labels lesbian women and gay men ( American Psychological Association, 2020 , p.153). However, because we partly study how sexual orientation categories are shared across gender groups, we have chosen to use the terms heterosexual, homosexual, and bisexual women and men when emphasizing the dynamic pattern of shared and non-shared group memberships. When referring to the cultural groups of lesbian women and gay men, we have chosen to use these recommended terms. The noun form (e.g., “bisexuals”) is only used when referring to the term used in data collection in referenced studies.

2. ^ www.qualtrics.com

3. ^ www.enkatfabriken.se

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Keywords: stereotype content model, gender, sexual orientation, stereotype content, intersectionality, agency, communion, implicit tests

Citation: Klysing A, Lindqvist A and Björklund F (2021) Stereotype Content at the Intersection of Gender and Sexual Orientation. Front. Psychol . 12:713839. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2021.713839

Received: 24 May 2021; Accepted: 23 June 2021; Published: 15 July 2021.

Reviewed by:

Copyright © 2021 Klysing, Lindqvist and Björklund. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY) . The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

*Correspondence: Amanda Klysing, [email protected]

Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.

July 8, 2020

Stereotypes Harm Black Lives and Livelihoods, but Research Suggests Ways to Improve Things

Management researcher Modupe Akinola explains on how stereotypes hurt Black Americans and what we can do to counter them

By Katy Milkman & Kassie Brabaw

Modupe Akinola speaks on stage at the New York Times 2015 DealBook Conference at the Whitney Museum of American Art on November 3, 2015, in New York City.

Neilson Barnard Getty Images

The Black Lives Matter protests shaking the world have thankfully brought renewed attention not just to police brutality but to the broader role of racism in our society. Research suggests some roots of racism lie in the stereotypes we hold about different groups. And those stereotypes can affect everything from the way police diagnose danger to who gets interviewed for jobs to which students get attention from professors. Negative stereotypes harm Black Americans at every turn. To reduce their pernicious effects, it’s important to first understand how stereotypes work and just how pervasive they are.

Modupe Akinola , an associate professor at Columbia Business School, studies racial bias, workforce diversity and stress. Recently, Katy Milkman , a professor at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, got to chat with Akinola about how stereotypes are formed, how they affect consequential decisions and how we can combat negative stereotypes .

[ An edited transcript of the interview follows. ]

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Let’s start at the beginning. What is a stereotype?

A stereotype is a snap judgment we make about a person or about a thing that can influence our decision-making. Every day we get millions and millions of bits of information in our head that associate good and bad with certain people or groups or things. And anytime we then see those people, groups or things, that association comes immediately to our mind.

Why do you think we do this?

We’re processing so much information all the time; we need these mental shortcuts to allow us to navigate the world. If not, we wouldn’t be able to function, quite frankly. We have to make quick judgments to make life easier and to simplify. But any type of shortcut can have its pros and cons.

Could you talk about some of the research connecting stereotyping with racism?

One of my favorite sets of studies examines stereotyping as it relates to policing. I grew up in New York City. And we heard a lot about Amadou Diallo, who was an unarmed Black man who was shot by police, because they thought he was carrying a gun—when in actuality, he raised his hand, and he had a wallet.

Joshua Correll, [now at the University of Colorado Boulder], and his colleagues wanted to look at whether the stereotypes associating Black people with danger could play a role in how a mistake like that could be made. The news we see regularly shows crime rates being higher for certain populations, mostly minority populations,. And so this creates an automatic stereotype that a Black man would be more linked to danger than a white man, because you don’t see those same associations for white people.

Correll came up with a computerized shooter bias exercise that showed pictures of targets, Black and white men, carrying objects, either weapons or regular objects like a Coke can or a wallet. When you saw a person and the object, you had to click on whether or not to shoot. He found that civilians were more likely to shoot unarmed Black men, relative to unarmed white men and even armed white men, which was attributed to the stereotypes associating Black people with danger.

I found that study fascinating, because it showed just how powerful these associations can be. I did some follow-up research, because I wanted to see if stress affects that decision-making process. I stressed out police officers and had them engage in the shooting exercise.

The interesting thing is: I saw that under stress, officers were more accurate. They were able to discern whether to shoot an armed Black man and did that better in terms of not shooting unarmed Black men. However, they were less likely to shoot armed white men, which I think demonstrates the power of stereotypes, because there isn’t a stereotype of white and danger.

Stereotypes work in two ways: they can harm some groups, and they can protect others.

Are there any other studies about stereotyping that you think people might find illuminating?

My favorite are audit studies, where you observe real-world behavior. There have been audit studies where people go to car dealerships to see if people are treated differently and about who gets mortgages and things like that.

One audit study was testing ads in the newspaper, which were advertising entry-level positions. [The researchers] sent candidate résumés to these job ads, which were identical, and changed the names on the résumés to signal race. “Lakisha” and “Jamal” were Black-sounding names that were tested and pretested to ensure they would signal race versus a name like “Catherine,” which would be a more white-sounding name. They waited to see who called back for which candidates. The Lakishas and Jamals received fewer callbacks for an interview than the white-sounding names.

Again, this behavior is attributed to stereotypes. We make presumptions and snap judgments about who might be more qualified for a job, who might do well in a job, even in the context of identical information.

Would you be willing to describe a little bit of the work we’ve done together on the role of stereotyping in academia?

Certainly. We—you, I and Dolly Chugh [of the Stern School of Business at New York University]—wanted to see if racial or gender stereotypes impact the pathway to academia. As you’re applying or thinking about getting a Ph.D., often you’ll reach out to a professor and ask, “Are you taking graduate students?” or “Can I learn more about your research?” We get these e-mails, all the time, asking for time on our schedule. And we wanted to see if professors would differentially respond to these requests, depending on the race and gender of the requester.

We sent e-mails to around 6,500 professors across the country, at both private and public universities. We sent these e-mails that were identical, except we varied the race and gender of the name of the applicant.

These e-mails said, “Dear professor so-and-so, I’ll be on campus on XYZ day, on a Monday or Tuesday, and was wondering if I could take some time to learn about your research.” The names on these e-mails were Chinese names, Indian names, African-American-, Latino- and white-sounding names. We pretested all these names to ensure that they did signal the race and gender we thought they would.

We expected to see more stereotyping or discrimination (i.e., fewer responses) to nonwhite males when asked to meet next week versus today. Why? Today everyone’s pretty busy, and so there’s no time for the stereotypes or snap judgments to come into your mind about who might be a more qualified student, who you might want to respond to and meet with.

However, in a meeting request for next week, you might go through more scrutiny about whether the candidate is worthy of your time. We thought that’s when stereotypes would set in. Maybe for some categories, it’s “Do they have English-language proficiency?” For other categories, given the lack of minorities in academia in general, there might be the question of “Can they cut it?”

As we predicted, we did find fewer responses for all of the other categories, relative to the responses to white males, for a meeting request for next week. The question then was whether we’d see this when we matched the race and the gender of the professor with the race and the gender of the student. We still found that requests for next week, regardless of the race of the professor, are lower for candidates other than white males.

As an African-American professor, in the early days of my teaching, I’d often find myself setting up to teach a class, and somebody, usually a prospective student, would come in and say, “I’d like to sit in and learn more about this class. Where’s the professor?” They would say that to me as I was setting up, looking like the professor—on the computer, getting everything ready. That, for me, was a perfect example of how stereotypes can play a role.

The stereotype of what a professor looks like—an older white man with gray hair—is one of the factors that might make somebody come in, see a person at the podium preparing for work and wearing a suit, and ask who the professor is. I love those moments, in some ways, because one of the ways in which you change people’s stereotypes is by having counter-stereotypical exemplars.

Let’s talk more about that. How can we combat stereotypes or try to reduce the harm they cause?

I think one of the ways we can reduce the harm of stereotypes is just being aware. Sometimes you’ll be walking down the street, and you’ll make a snap judgment and not even realize it. But I think one of the critical aspects is noticing, “Oh wow, that came up for me. That’s interesting,” and thinking, “Where did that come from?” We can change our behavior when we’re more aware that our behavior is being influenced by stereotypes.

The other way is by being exposed to counter-stereotypical exemplars. As an African-American, female professor, a student’s mere exposure to me means that the next time they go into a classroom with an African-American woman setting up, or someone else who might defy the stereotype of what a professor looks like, they won’t automatically say, “Where’s the professor?”

I often tell my students they have a beautiful opportunity to be the walking, breathing and living counter-stereotypical exemplars in their work environments. I ask them to think about the stereotypes that exist about them, the stereotypes that exist about people around them, the stereotypes that exist about people on their teams— and to realize that, every day, they have the opportunity to defy those stereotypes.

Katy Milkman is a behavioral scientist and James G. Dinan Professor of Operations, Information and Decisions at the Wharton School . She is co-director of the Behavior Change for Good Initiative .

Kassie Brabaw is a journalist writing about health, relationships and astronomy. Find her work at Health, SELF.com, Women’s Health, VICE.com and Space.com.

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Gender Categorization and Stereotypes Beyond the Binary

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• Marie Isabelle Weißflog   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0003-0686-0581 1 &
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Gender categorization and stereotyping can lead to discrimination. Researchers have mostly studied cisgender, gender-conforming individuals as the targets when examining these processes. In two factorial survey experiments, we investigated gender categorization and stereotyping of gender-ambiguous targets based on facial features and behavioral information. We manipulated femininity/masculinity/ambiguity of face, expression, and occupation. Participants completed a gender categorization task, and stereotype and attitude measures. The findings indicated that face was most influential for categorization: When face was unambiguously masculine or feminine, participants mostly categorized targets as male or female, respectively. In these cases, expression and occupation had little influence on categorization. When face was ambiguous, this additional information significantly influenced categorization. Nonbinary categorization was more likely for ambiguous faces, and most likely for ambiguous faces combined with ambiguous expression and ambiguous or feminine occupation. Our findings suggest that categorizing gender-ambiguous targets is more complex compared to clearly gendered targets. Primarily relying on face when it appears clearly gendered likely causes categorization errors when encountering TGNC individuals.

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113 Stereotype Essay Topics & Examples

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• Pick a broad problem. An essay has a specified word count, and your instructor will not reward writing over the set limit. Choose an issue that you are sure you can adequately cover in the specified pages, and remember to adhere to your received instructions. There is nothing worse than writing an excellent essay and losing marks for not following directions.
• Plagiarize from others’ essay examples. Copying and pasting sentences is an academic offense, as is merely rewording them, and you should avoid discrediting your hard work. Getting your paper disqualified is not worth a small increase in marks.
• Attempt to subvert every stereotype you come across. While deconstructing some issues is a noble endeavor, this work may be extensive and exhausting, as well as not the main point of your paper. Remember your thesis statement, and work in those facts that relate to it.
• Make light of your chosen problem. Just as with your title, your writing should remain respectful and academic, using only credible information and referencing trusted sources. Remember that, as with any humanities issue, stereotypes are a societal byproduct that affects living people, who deserve fair treatment.
• Skip the pre-writing stages. Doing so may lead you to write an essay, which is not only off-point but also overwhelmingly one-sided. Your paper should give adequate attention to different sides of one issue, presenting different viewpoints, studies, and academic opinions, which brainstorming helps achieve.

Need more tips? Let IvyPanda guide your writing process!

• Importance of Stereotypes in Communication People are eager to use their prior knowledge about different ethnic groups to be ready for communicating, still, the impact of stereotypes cannot be pure negative or pure positive, and this is why it is […]
• The Male Bashing Stereotype: Formal Critique All of the mistakes and lack of social molding that they show women during their youth are not the stuff that dictates the kind of men they will be in the future.
• Stereotype of Aboriginals and Alcohol in Canada Therefore, it is necessary to research whether the given prejudice has certain grounds to base on, track the measures that are being currently undertaken to eliminate the stereotype and offer other efficient ideas that will […]
• White Female Stereotypes in Media In most instances, the images that are in the media are of exceptionally slim white girls and women, and this sends a negative image to those women that have bigger bodies.
• Hoodies and the stereotype. Bad or not? The hoodie marches had a lot of racial undertones, but it is clear that the victim’s piece of clothing was the centre of attention in these campaigns.
• The “Welfare Queen” Stereotype in the US Reagan’s portrayal of these ladies was used to justify real-world policy changes and contributed to the shrinkage of the social safety net.
• Stereotypes in United Kingdom A stereotype is a common or popular belief about certain people or behaviors of certain individuals. People from different cultures have different stereotypes.
• Stereotype of a Black Female In the following paper, three stereotypes that I have faced in my life will be addressed in terms of the reasons for their formation and the mistakes that lie at the heart of these stereotypes.
• To Be Disabled: Stereotype Analysis The purpose of this paper is to examine, how the stereotype is reinforced in the world, and how disabled people experience it.
• Common Stereotypes and Reinforcing Rhetoric It is safe to assume that due to this stereotype of lies, the members of the public are not willing to listen to politicians anymore because they expect these politicians to be feeding them with […]
• Perception, Stereotype and Empathy As a result, most of the people have believed that this is the case. The purpose of this activity is to illustrate that we all have different perceptions and explore the reasons associated with this.
• High Design, Stereotype, Postmodernism What is the most complicated about the heavenly goods is that one and the same object cannot be changed in a way which would distinguish it greatly from the objects of the same kind.”Beyond a […]
• The Dynamics of Stereotype Priming and Assimilation The activation of a mental representation of a social group leads to behaviour corresponding to specific attributes of the stereotype. For priming a stereotype some researchers have held that accessibility of the information and the […]
• Traditional Stereotype of Female Characters Analysis The methodology used by the author is a first content analysis of the video games, identification of the protagonists, and then studying the effect it has on girls.
• Racism Issues: Looking and Stereotype In order to find the answer to this question, it is important to introduce the concept of ‘looking’ supporting with the writing of Sturken and Cartwright, Hall, Goodwin, and Gooding-Williams.
• Women and the Industry of the Trap Music: Empowering or Succumbing to the Stereotype? Indeed, on the further scrutiny of the problem, one will see that the issue of female DJs in the trap music domain In light of the specified argument, one may infer that abandoning the trap […]
• Stereotype of Video Games Being for Boys In the article author speaks about the problem of different video games that designed for boys and for girls. In this article author explains that gender difference in the video games is a marketing strategy […]
• Stereotype Threats and Social Psychology Pickren defines social norm as “The rules of behavior that are considered acceptable in a group or society”.to the society, it was acceptable to treat the immigrants differently from the rest of the population because […]
• Stereotype-Conductive Behavior The notion that fat people are lazy is because many of them avoid doing activities that would require them to spend a lot of energy and movement. In many cases, the speed of fat people […]
• Chinese Stereotypes Reflected in Movies The main research objective will be to: “Analyse Chinese stereotypes in movies” The specific objectives will include: To identify the various stereotypical depictions of the Chinese in movies To determine the relationship between Chinese stereotype […]
• Review of Stereotype Threat and Arousal: Effects on Women’s Math Performance The variables used in the study were gender, difficulty of the tests, and the perception of stereotype threat. The results of the data were that the implication of stereotype threat did in fact negatively affect […]
• Stereotypes in the media Media has continued to group people by their tribes and the effects of the tribal stereotype is mostly felt in the less developed world.
• Influence of activating implicit gender stereotypes in females The results revealed that the participants who were subjected to the gender based prime performed relatively poorly compared to their counterparts on the nature prime.
• “Stereotype Threat: Effects on Education” by Smith, Cary Stacy, and Li-Ching Hung In some cases, only the topic of these sources is similar to that of the article and not their subject matter.
• Stereotypes of Islam and Muslims in the West This was evident after Shadid made analyses of various publications which analyzed the threat of Islam and the Muslim community to the western countries and fashion such stereotypical messages in the realm of myth.
• How Anthropology Helps to Evaluate Stereotypes The recent study on leadership shows that women have been enlightened and they are up to take their positions in leadership.
• Towards Evaluating the Relationship Between Gender Stereotypes & Culture It is therefore the object of this paper to examine the relationship between gender stereotypes and culture with a view to elucidating how gender stereotypes, reinforced by our diverse cultural beliefs, continue to allocate roles […]
• Stereotypes people have toward Chinese Most of these studies focus on the major stereotypes held about the Chinese but forget to address the effects of these stereotypes to the Chinese students especially the ones studying in other countries.
• How contemporary toys enforce gender stereotypes in the UK Children defined some of the physical attributes of the toys.”Baby Annabell Function Doll” is a likeness of a baby in that it that it has the size and physical features of a baby.
• Stereotypes and Their Effects Three common stereotypes include the perception that Muslims are terrorists, Christians are ignorant, and that women are less intelligent than men.
• Stereotype Threat: Women’s Abilities in Math On the other hand, in study 2, they demonstrated that it is possible to reduce the performance differences when elimination of the stereotype that is descriptive of the anticipated performance is done to ensure that […]
• Gender Studies: Gender Stereotypes From what is portrayed in the media, it is possible for people to dismiss others on the basis of whether they have masculinity or are feminine.
• Gender stereotypes of superheroes The analysis is based on the number of male versus female characters, the physical characteristic of each individual character, the ability to solve a problem individually as either male or female and both males and […]
• Cross-Cultural Interaction: Prejudices and Stereotypes In this regard, the concept of stereotype also influences social categorization and information sharing in the course of cross-cultural communication. One of the most effective ways to exterminate stereotypic and linear thinking is to change […]
• Aspects of Rhetoric and Stereotype Image It is clear then, that feminists are found to be of negative stereotypes from the start. The stereotypes in this group are a complete revelation of both positive and negative image.
• African-American Students and Mathematics Achievement Gap: Stereotype or Reality? The purpose of this research is to find whether there is the evidence of the math performance gap between Black and White students and, if we find that it exists, to throw ling upon its […]
• Sex, Lies, and Stereotypes: Being Prejudiced Because of Inequalities Is Not Always Correct The exhibition under consideration, Sex, Lies and Stereotypes, is aimed to prove how unfair but still constant discrimination of people is; and several illustrative posters like Women Are Not Chicks or Oh, So That Explains […]
• Canadian Stereotypes On the cover of the novel Canadian stereotypes, there will be the image of the maple leaf bag. The image of the maple leaf bag will represent both the flag and the history of the […]
• Learning to Stereotype: The Lifelong Romance One of the most enchanting novels in the American literature, the piece by Cahan offers a plunge into the world of the usual.
• Stereotypes of American Citizens McAndrew and Akande lament that in the United States, African Americans are the most stereotyped due to racial discrimination and the dark history of slavery.
• Gender Stereotypes on Television Gender stereotyping in television commercials is a topic that has generated a huge debate and it is an important topic to explore to find out how gender roles in voice-overs TV commercials and the type […]
• The Stereotype Of A Smart High Achieving Asian American
• Racial Stereotyping : A Stereotype, As Defined By The Merriam
• Prejudice, Stereotype, Discrimination, and In-Group Vs. Outgroup
• The Sports Media and the Marketing Advertisers a Hypermasculine Stereotype
• Think like a Monkey: Borrowing from Animal Social Dynamics to Reduce Stereotype Threat
• The Metamorphosis Of The Schemer Stereotype
• How Stereotype Threat May Cause Poor Performance In Women
• Women Are Worse Drivers than Men Stereotype
• What Is The Function Of Racist Stereotype In Blackface Minstrelsy
• How Race And Stereotype Can Affect Justice Being Served
• The Imposition of Gender Stereotype by Society Today
• Women’s Oppression In Hurston’s “Sweat”: The Stereotype Of Women’s Role In Society
• Understanding the Gender Stereotype of the Macho-Man Myth
• Use Of A Stereotype Cue On The Perceived Level Of Mathematics
• The Stereotype of Women in a Patriarchal Society
• The Stereotype of Female Taming in Shakespeare’s Time in the Taming of the Shrew
• The Stereotype of the Dumb Blonde in Legally Blonde, a Movie by Robert Luketic
• Americanization : The Creation Of The Indian Stereotype
• The Impact of Stereotype Threat on Age Differences in Memory Performance
• Sexually Driven Media Advertisements Objectify And Stereotype
• Advantage and Disadvantage of Fitting Into the Stereotype
• An Analysis of the Stereotype of Masculinity in the Early 1800s
• Analyzing How a Conventional or Stereotype Character Functions to Achieve Authors Purposes
• Perspective and Stereotype in Western Detective Novels
• The Stereotype Of Criminally Disposed People In Poverty
• Women ‘s Portrayal Of Women Essay – Brand, Marketing, Stereotype, Gen
• Feminine Autonomy and Erasing the Male Stereotype in Juno and the Paycoc
• The History of Chief Illiniwek as a University of Illinois Mascot and Racist Stereotype
• Women ‘s Role For Society ‘s Stereotype Towards Women
• Why Stereotype Based on Blood Type Genotype or Body Type?
• Do Television Advertisements Stereotype the Roles of Men and Women in the Society
• An Analysis of Stereotype Italian American in Sopranos the Cable Show in United States
• Women: Does Stereotype Threat Affect Their Ability?
• American Cheerleader: The Icon, The Stereotype, And The Truth
• Alice Sebold And The Stranger Stereotype
• An Analysis of the Negative Stereotype of the Jewish Race in Jewbird and The Last Mohican
• The Stereotype African Characters in Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
• The Impact Of The Violent African American Stereotype In Rap Music
• The Teenage Driver Stereotype in Society
• Breaking the Stereotype: Why Urban Aboriginals Score Highly on Happiness Measures
• An Analysis of the Macho-Men Stereotype Plaguing Today’s Man
• The Problems of the Aboriginal People and the Average Media Stereotype
• How Racialized Stereotypes Determine a Community’s Value?
• What Is a Cultural Stereotype?
• How Advertising Reinforces Gender Stereotypes?
• How Stereotypes for Women Came to Be?
• How Do Contemporary Toys Enforce Gender Stereotypes?
• What Are Social Stereotypes?
• Are Continuum Beliefs About Psychotic Symptoms Associated With Stereotypes About Schizophrenia?
• How Do Hispanic Bilinguals’ Cultural Stereotypes Shape Advertising Persuasiveness?
• How Do Racialized Stereotypes Determine a Community’s Value?
• How Does Drag Affect Stereotypes About Gay Men?
• How Refugee’s Stereotypes Toward Host Society Members Predict Acculturation Orientations?
• Why Are Female Stereotypes in Advertising Still Effective?
• Can Gender Quotas Break Down Negative Stereotypes?
• Does Mainstream Media Have a Duty to Challenge Gender Stereotypes?
• How Have Gender Stereotypes Always Been a Part of Society?
• How Do Attitudes and Stereotypes Develop?
• Are Sexist Attitudes and Gender Stereotypes Linked?
• Are Gender Stereotypes Perpetuated in Children’s Magazines?
• What Are Gender Stereotypes?
• How Gender Stereotypes Warp Our View of Depression?
• How Are Class Stereotypes Maintained in the Press?
• How Can Bob Dylan and Wolf Biermann Be Employed to Make Students Aware of Stereotypes and Prejudice?
• How Do Racial Stereotypes Affect Society?
• How Did Photography Reflect the Values and Stereotypes That Underlay European Colonialism?
• How Can Stereotypes Contribute to Inequality?
• What Makes People Have Certain Stereotypes?
• How Can Stereotypes Negatively Affect Listening?
• Why Are Stereotypes Dangerous and What Can Be Done to Reduce Them?
• How Are Stereotypes Used to Racially Profile People?
• How American Minorities Are Stereotypes in American Drama Series?
• Chicago (A-D)
• Chicago (N-B)

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Bibliography

IvyPanda . "113 Stereotype Essay Topics & Examples." October 26, 2023. https://ivypanda.com/essays/topic/stereotype-essay-examples/.

• Gender Stereotypes Essay Titles
• Equality Topics
• Cultural Psychology Ideas
• Prejudice Essay Topics
• Ethnicity Research Topics
• Human Behavior Research Topics
• Oppression Research Topics
• Sociological Imagination Topics
• Orientalism Titles
• Racism Paper Topics
• Sociological Perspectives Titles
• Tolerance Essay Ideas
• Sexism Essay Ideas
• Gender Roles Paper Topics
• Self-Concept Questions

Announcing the NeurIPS 2023 Paper Awards 

Communications Chairs 2023 2023 Conference awards , neurips2023

By Amir Globerson, Kate Saenko, Moritz Hardt, Sergey Levine and Comms Chair, Sahra Ghalebikesabi 

We are honored to announce the award-winning papers for NeurIPS 2023! This year’s prestigious awards consist of the Test of Time Award plus two Outstanding Paper Awards in each of these three categories: 

• Two Outstanding Main Track Papers 
• Two Outstanding Main Track Runner-Ups 
• Two Outstanding Datasets and Benchmark Track Papers  

This year’s organizers received a record number of paper submissions. Of the 13,300 submitted papers that were reviewed by 968 Area Chairs, 98 senior area chairs, and 396 Ethics reviewers 3,540  were accepted after 502 papers were flagged for ethics reviews . 

We thank the awards committee for the main track: Yoav Artzi, Chelsea Finn, Ludwig Schmidt, Ricardo Silva, Isabel Valera, and Mengdi Wang. For the Datasets and Benchmarks track, we thank Sergio Escalera, Isabelle Guyon, Neil Lawrence, Dina Machuve, Olga Russakovsky, Hugo Jair Escalante, Deepti Ghadiyaram, and Serena Yeung. Conflicts of interest were taken into account in the decision process.

Congratulations to all the authors! See Posters Sessions Tue-Thur in Great Hall & B1-B2 (level 1).

Outstanding Main Track Papers

Privacy Auditing with One (1) Training Run Authors: Thomas Steinke · Milad Nasr · Matthew Jagielski

Poster session 2: Tue 12 Dec 5:15 p.m. — 7:15 p.m. CST, #1523

Oral: Tue 12 Dec 3:40 p.m. — 4:40 p.m. CST, Room R06-R09 (level 2)

Abstract: We propose a scheme for auditing differentially private machine learning systems with a single training run. This exploits the parallelism of being able to add or remove multiple training examples independently. We analyze this using the connection between differential privacy and statistical generalization, which avoids the cost of group privacy. Our auditing scheme requires minimal assumptions about the algorithm and can be applied in the black-box or white-box setting. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework by applying it to DP-SGD, where we can achieve meaningful empirical privacy lower bounds by training only one model. In contrast, standard methods would require training hundreds of models.

Are Emergent Abilities of Large Language Models a Mirage? Authors: Rylan Schaeffer · Brando Miranda · Sanmi Koyejo

Poster session 6: Thu 14 Dec 5:00 p.m. — 7:00 p.m. CST, #1108

Oral: Thu 14 Dec 3:20 p.m. — 3:35 p.m. CST, Hall C2 (level 1) 

Abstract: Recent work claims that large language models display emergent abilities, abilities not present in smaller-scale models that are present in larger-scale models. What makes emergent abilities intriguing is two-fold: their sharpness, transitioning seemingly instantaneously from not present to present, and their unpredictability , appearing at seemingly unforeseeable model scales. Here, we present an alternative explanation for emergent abilities: that for a particular task and model family, when analyzing fixed model outputs, emergent abilities appear due to the researcher’s choice of metric rather than due to fundamental changes in model behavior with scale. Specifically, nonlinear or discontinuous metrics produce apparent emergent abilities, whereas linear or continuous metrics produce smooth, continuous, predictable changes in model performance. We present our alternative explanation in a simple mathematical model, then test it in three complementary ways: we (1) make, test and confirm three predictions on the effect of metric choice using the InstructGPT/GPT-3 family on tasks with claimed emergent abilities, (2) make, test and confirm two predictions about metric choices in a meta-analysis of emergent abilities on BIG-Bench; and (3) show how to choose metrics to produce never-before-seen seemingly emergent abilities in multiple vision tasks across diverse deep networks. Via all three analyses, we provide evidence that alleged emergent abilities evaporate with different metrics or with better statistics, and may not be a fundamental property of scaling AI models.

Outstanding Main Track Runner-Ups

Scaling Data-Constrained Language Models Authors : Niklas Muennighoff · Alexander Rush · Boaz Barak · Teven Le Scao · Nouamane Tazi · Aleksandra Piktus · Sampo Pyysalo · Thomas Wolf · Colin Raffel

Poster session 2: Tue 12 Dec 5:15 p.m. — 7:15 p.m. CST, #813

Oral: Tue 12 Dec 3:40 p.m. — 4:40 p.m. CST, Hall C2 (level 1)  

Abstract : The current trend of scaling language models involves increasing both parameter count and training dataset size. Extrapolating this trend suggests that training dataset size may soon be limited by the amount of text data available on the internet. Motivated by this limit, we investigate scaling language models in data-constrained regimes. Specifically, we run a large set of experiments varying the extent of data repetition and compute budget, ranging up to 900 billion training tokens and 9 billion parameter models. We find that with constrained data for a fixed compute budget, training with up to 4 epochs of repeated data yields negligible changes to loss compared to having unique data. However, with more repetition, the value of adding compute eventually decays to zero. We propose and empirically validate a scaling law for compute optimality that accounts for the decreasing value of repeated tokens and excess parameters. Finally, we experiment with approaches mitigating data scarcity, including augmenting the training dataset with code data or removing commonly used filters. Models and datasets from our 400 training runs are freely available at https://github.com/huggingface/datablations .

Direct Preference Optimization: Your Language Model is Secretly a Reward Model Authors: Rafael Rafailov · Archit Sharma · Eric Mitchell · Christopher D Manning · Stefano Ermon · Chelsea Finn

Poster session 6: Thu 14 Dec 5:00 p.m. — 7:00 p.m. CST, #625

Oral: Thu 14 Dec 3:50 p.m. — 4:05 p.m. CST, Ballroom A-C (level 2)  

Abstract: While large-scale unsupervised language models (LMs) learn broad world knowledge and some reasoning skills, achieving precise control of their behavior is difficult due to the completely unsupervised nature of their training. Existing methods for gaining such steerability collect human labels of the relative quality of model generations and fine-tune the unsupervised LM to align with these preferences, often with reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF). However, RLHF is a complex and often unstable procedure, first fitting a reward model that reflects the human preferences, and then fine-tuning the large unsupervised LM using reinforcement learning to maximize this estimated reward without drifting too far from the original model. In this paper, we leverage a mapping between reward functions and optimal policies to show that this constrained reward maximization problem can be optimized exactly with a single stage of policy training, essentially solving a classification problem on the human preference data. The resulting algorithm, which we call Direct Preference Optimization (DPO), is stable, performant, and computationally lightweight, eliminating the need for fitting a reward model, sampling from the LM during fine-tuning, or performing significant hyperparameter tuning. Our experiments show that DPO can fine-tune LMs to align with human preferences as well as or better than existing methods. Notably, fine-tuning with DPO exceeds RLHF’s ability to control sentiment of generations and improves response quality in summarization and single-turn dialogue while being substantially simpler to implement and train.

Outstanding Datasets and Benchmarks Papers

In the dataset category : 

ClimSim: A large multi-scale dataset for hybrid physics-ML climate emulation

Authors:  Sungduk Yu · Walter Hannah · Liran Peng · Jerry Lin · Mohamed Aziz Bhouri · Ritwik Gupta · Björn Lütjens · Justus C. Will · Gunnar Behrens · Julius Busecke · Nora Loose · Charles Stern · Tom Beucler · Bryce Harrop · Benjamin Hillman · Andrea Jenney · Savannah L. Ferretti · Nana Liu · Animashree Anandkumar · Noah Brenowitz · Veronika Eyring · Nicholas Geneva · Pierre Gentine · Stephan Mandt · Jaideep Pathak · Akshay Subramaniam · Carl Vondrick · Rose Yu · Laure Zanna · Tian Zheng · Ryan Abernathey · Fiaz Ahmed · David Bader · Pierre Baldi · Elizabeth Barnes · Christopher Bretherton · Peter Caldwell · Wayne Chuang · Yilun Han · YU HUANG · Fernando Iglesias-Suarez · Sanket Jantre · Karthik Kashinath · Marat Khairoutdinov · Thorsten Kurth · Nicholas Lutsko · Po-Lun Ma · Griffin Mooers · J. David Neelin · David Randall · Sara Shamekh · Mark Taylor · Nathan Urban · Janni Yuval · Guang Zhang · Mike Pritchard

Poster session 4: Wed 13 Dec 5:00 p.m. — 7:00 p.m. CST, #105 

Oral: Wed 13 Dec 3:45 p.m. — 4:00 p.m. CST, Ballroom A-C (level 2)

Abstract: Modern climate projections lack adequate spatial and temporal resolution due to computational constraints. A consequence is inaccurate and imprecise predictions of critical processes such as storms. Hybrid methods that combine physics with machine learning (ML) have introduced a new generation of higher fidelity climate simulators that can sidestep Moore’s Law by outsourcing compute-hungry, short, high-resolution simulations to ML emulators. However, this hybrid ML-physics simulation approach requires domain-specific treatment and has been inaccessible to ML experts because of lack of training data and relevant, easy-to-use workflows. We present ClimSim, the largest-ever dataset designed for hybrid ML-physics research. It comprises multi-scale climate simulations, developed by a consortium of climate scientists and ML researchers. It consists of 5.7 billion pairs of multivariate input and output vectors that isolate the influence of locally-nested, high-resolution, high-fidelity physics on a host climate simulator’s macro-scale physical state. The dataset is global in coverage, spans multiple years at high sampling frequency, and is designed such that resulting emulators are compatible with downstream coupling into operational climate simulators. We implement a range of deterministic and stochastic regression baselines to highlight the ML challenges and their scoring. The data (https://huggingface.co/datasets/LEAP/ClimSim_high-res) and code (https://leap-stc.github.io/ClimSim) are released openly to support the development of hybrid ML-physics and high-fidelity climate simulations for the benefit of science and society.   

In the benchmark category :

DecodingTrust: A Comprehensive Assessment of Trustworthiness in GPT Models

Authors: Boxin Wang · Weixin Chen · Hengzhi Pei · Chulin Xie · Mintong Kang · Chenhui Zhang · Chejian Xu · Zidi Xiong · Ritik Dutta · Rylan Schaeffer · Sang Truong · Simran Arora · Mantas Mazeika · Dan Hendrycks · Zinan Lin · Yu Cheng · Sanmi Koyejo · Dawn Song · Bo Li

Poster session 1: Tue 12 Dec 10:45 a.m. — 12:45 p.m. CST, #1618  

Oral: Tue 12 Dec 10:30 a.m. — 10:45 a.m. CST, Ballroom A-C (Level 2)

Abstract: Generative Pre-trained Transformer (GPT) models have exhibited exciting progress in capabilities, capturing the interest of practitioners and the public alike. Yet, while the literature on the trustworthiness of GPT models remains limited, practitioners have proposed employing capable GPT models for sensitive applications to healthcare and finance – where mistakes can be costly. To this end, this work proposes a comprehensive trustworthiness evaluation for large language models with a focus on GPT-4 and GPT-3.5, considering diverse perspectives – including toxicity, stereotype bias, adversarial robustness, out-of-distribution robustness, robustness on adversarial demonstrations, privacy, machine ethics, and fairness. Based on our evaluations, we discover previously unpublished vulnerabilities to trustworthiness threats. For instance, we find that GPT models can be easily misled to generate toxic and biased outputs and leak private information in both training data and conversation history. We also find that although GPT-4 is usually more trustworthy than GPT-3.5 on standard benchmarks, GPT-4 is more vulnerable given jailbreaking system or user prompts, potentially due to the reason that GPT-4 follows the (misleading) instructions more precisely. Our work illustrates a comprehensive trustworthiness evaluation of GPT models and sheds light on the trustworthiness gaps. Our benchmark is publicly available at https://decodingtrust.github.io/.

Test of Time

This year, following the usual practice, we chose a NeurIPS paper from 10 years ago to receive the Test of Time Award, and “ Distributed Representations of Words and Phrases and their Compositionality ” by Tomas Mikolov, Ilya Sutskever, Kai Chen, Greg Corrado, and Jeffrey Dean, won. 

Published at NeurIPS 2013 and cited over 40,000 times, the work introduced the seminal word embedding technique word2vec. Demonstrating the power of learning from large amounts of unstructured text, the work catalyzed progress that marked the beginning of a new era in natural language processing.

Greg Corrado and Jeffrey Dean will be giving a talk about this work and related research on Tuesday, 12 Dec at 3:05 – 3:25 pm CST in Hall F.  

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Reflections on the neurips 2023 ethics review process, neurips newsletter – november 2023.

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Sami Michael, Israeli Novelist With Arabic Roots, Dies at 97

A refugee from Iraq, he explored in popular books the worlds of Jews living in Arabic countries or who fled persecution, and of Arabs living in Israel.

By Joseph Berger

Sami Michael, an Iraqi-born Israeli writer whose novels illuminate the world of Jews from Arabic countries and the prejudices and discrimination that they, as well as Israeli Arabs, have experienced, died on Monday in Haifa, the mixed Jewish-Arab city in Israel where he lived. He was 97.

His wife, Rachel Michael, confirmed his death.

Like many exiles, Mr. Michael (pronounced mee-KAH-ale) had one foot planted in the country where he settled and the other in the country he left behind. He fled Iraq in 1948 after the outbreak of war between the newly formed nation of Israel and its Arab neighbors, Iraq among them. As a Jew and a Communist activist, he had been threatened with prison and execution in Iraq.

In Israel, he said, he found that as a 23-year-old refugee from the Middle East, he was looked down upon and treated like a second-class citizen by Jews of European origin.

“When he came to Israel, he wasn’t seen as equal to the European immigrants, and he had to fight against that,” said Nancy E. Berg, a professor of Jewish, Islamic and Middle Eastern studies at Washington University in St. Louis and the author of “More and More Equal: The Literary Works of Sami Michael” (2004). “That led him to the kinds of things he writes about in his books.”

A native Arabic speaker, Mr. Michael had to master Hebrew, and when he did, he published his first novel in 1974, with the title “All Men Are Equal — But Some Are More,” a variation on a quotation from George Orwell’s “Animal Farm.” (The title has also been rendered in English as “Equal and More Equal.”)

The book is set in the squalid transit camps that housed immigrants, known in Hebrew as Mizrahim, or Easterners, who had escaped persecution in Arabic countries in North Africa and the Middle East. The protagonist, David, a child of those camps, performs valiantly in the Israeli-Arab War of 1967 but learns that his heroism and professional expertise do not insulate him against discrimination.

In the novel “Refuge” (1977), an Iraqi-Jewish character is grateful to Israel for giving him asylum after years in an Iraqi prison, but he is disillusioned by the difference in economic and social status between the Mizrahim and European Jews.

Mr. Michael went on to write “A Handful of Fog” (1979), which is set in the 2,500-year-old community of Babylonian Jews in Iraq. In the novel, he depicts the colorful, ethnically diverse life that flourished there in the 1930s and ’40s but that later edged toward extinction with the persecutions and expulsions of Jews following Israel’s gaining independence in 1948.

His other novels include “Victoria” (1995), a best seller in Israel centering on the patriarchal world of a Jewish woman in Baghdad; and “A Trumpet in the Wadi,” (2003), which traces the romance between a Christian Arab woman and a Russian Jewish immigrant and touches on the hostility that Israeli Arabs sometimes face in their dealings with government officials.

He also spent six years translating into Hebrew three Arabic novels by the Nobel Prize-winning Egyptian writer Naguib Mahfouz .

“My biological mother is Iraq, my adopted mother is Israel,” Mr. Michael told Benny Ziffer, the literary editor of the newspaper Haaretz, in a 2016 interview as part of a tribute to Mr. Michael at Northwestern University. “I belong to both sides. It isn’t difficult for me to go back and say that Iraq, and especially Jewish Iraq, are part of me.”

Mr. Michael wrote a dozen novels, three books of nonfiction, three plays and a children’s book, winning a barrel of awards and honorary doctorates and carving out a place for himself alongside such world-class Israeli writers as Amos Oz , David Grossman and A.B. Yehoshua . In a statement of condolence, President Isaac Herzog of Israel extolled Mr. Michael as a “giant among giants.”

“Sami Michael changed the face of Israeli literature,” said Lital Levy , an associate professor of comparative literature at Princeton University. “He wrote in Hebrew about topics and characters that were previously unknown to many readers, or were considered outside the scope of Israeliness: Iraqi-Jewish and Palestinian-Arab Communists, rich and poor Jews in Baghdad, Arabic-speaking Jewish intellectuals.”

She added, in an email: “He gave his characters complexity and depth but also made them relatable and accessible to readers, breaking down cultural walls and stereotypes. He used a trenchant and incisive social realism to expand Israelis’ understanding of the ties that bind Jews and Arabs, both historically and in the present. His popularity among Israeli readers bestowed legitimacy on Mizrahi literature and the world it contained.”

In the interview at Northwestern, Mr. Ziffer said Mr. Michael was the first Israeli writer “to describe Arabs, real Arabs, as they are.” And Professor Berg noted that “even though his characters were flawed people, there was an authorial affection for them.”

While Mizrahim generally skew to the right in Israel’s tumultuous politics, Mr. Michael was unabashedly left-wing and among the first writers and artists in the 1950s to call for the creation of a Palestinian state alongside Israel. For two decades, he was president of the Association for Civil Rights in Israel.

A secular and atheistic Jew, he nevertheless praised Judaism in his nonfiction book “Unbounded Ideas” (2000) for being a religion of compassion, grace, benevolence and freedom. But he lamented that “an unbending nationalistic leadership has arisen that struggles tirelessly to recruit the faith for clearly political goals.”

“This marriage has brought corruption of the Jewish religion in Israel,” he said.

Sami Michael was born Kamal Salah in Baghdad on Aug. 15, 1926 to Menashe and Georgia Michael. (Like many Jewish immigrants, he changed his name to one more congenial to Hebrew.) His father, a secular Jew, was a merchant, and his mother managed the household.

He attended Jewish schools, receiving a high school diploma in 1945, but mixed easily with Christians and Muslims, Mr. Michael remembered. Troubled by the authoritarian Iraqi regime and a 1941 pogrom in Baghdad, he joined the Communist underground at the age of 15 and within two years was writing articles for the Iraqi Communist press.

When the authorities issued a warrant for his arrest, he fled to Iran and landed in Israel a year later. He settled in an Arabic quarter of Haifa and went to work for Arabic-language editions of a Communist Party newspaper. When reports surfaced of Stalin’s reign of terror in the Soviet Union, he quit the party, though he remained a Marxist, and worked as a hydrologist for the Israeli government’s agriculture department, a career that lasted 25 years. He didn’t publish his first novel until he was in his late 40s.

In addition to his wife, who was Rachel Yonah when they met, his survivors include two children, Dikla and Amir, from his first marriage, to Malka Rivkin; and five grandchildren.

In a yearlong visit to Israel for research on her book, the first study of Mr. Michael’s works, Professor Berg was struck by his popularity with the full spectrum of Israelis. “He’s a writer in the canon that people actually read,” she said. “Because of his humanity and humor, people can relate to his work.”

An earlier version of this obituary misspelled Mr. Michael’s wife’s name when he married her. She was Rachel Yonah, not Yona.

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Joseph Berger was a reporter and editor at The Times for 30 years. He is the author of a recently published biography of Elie Wiesel. More about Joseph Berger