I received the “Whistling Vivaldi: how stereotypes affect us and what we can do’’ book by Claude Steele as a Christmas gift and it was the best gift I got this year. The book explains, in a scientific way backed with experiments and publications, how negative stereotypes and stigmatizations related to certain groups influence the intellectual and physical ability of the people who belong to those groups. I found the book clarifying to me a lot of what I went through as a female Egyptian Ph.D. student in Computer Science in the UK. I could relate to the feelings, the struggles, and the experiences of the students who participated in the experiments described in the book. I finished the book in a week and decided to write this summary to spread knowledge.

Stereotype Threat

The main argument of the book is that negative stereotypes or what the author calls “stereotype threats” negatively affect the performance of the groups of people who suffer from negative stereotypes in any walk of life, for example, women in advanced math courses, black students in universities and white men in physical competition. He argues that this underperformance is a consequence of the pressure that these groups are under due to trying to disprove that negative stereotypes related to their race, sex, social class, or mental health.

Claude and his research team tested this idea in a lab experiment where they brought a group of strong women math students and were given a difficult math test. The group was divided into two: one group ,group A, was given a test sheet that includes a sentence saying “In general men outperform women on this test” and the second group ,group B, was given a test sheet that included a sentence saying “in general men and women perform similarly on this test”. The results showed that the women in group A underperformed on the test while the women in group B did not. The same results were replicated in a series of similar experiments that included back students underperforming in the GRE when they took it as a measure of intellectual ability and white students underperforming playing golf as a measure for physical fitness.

What are the physical effects of stereotype threats?

To understand the influence that stereotype threat has on the body and the brain of the people under stereotype threat, the author cites an experiment where a group of black and white students was hooked up to a cardiovascular recording machine to record their blood pressure as a measure of their levels of stress and anxiety. The students then were given a test. The black students were divided into two groups. Group A which is the stereotype threat group, understood that the test was a measure of intelligence. Group B which is the control group was told that the test is a race fair where black students did as well as the white students. The results showed that the blood pressure of the white students and group B students dropped slightly during the test compared before the test. On the other hand, the blood pressure of group A students rose dramatically during the test compared to before the test. This means that group A students were anxious and stressed even if the students did not report feeling the stress.

What are the cognitive effects of stereotype threats?

With all the mounting evidence of the effects of stereotype threat, the author and his research group set out to find out what determines how much stereotype threat a person feels in a setting? They argue that the slightest cues, often innocent appearing cues that seem to be a natural unavoidable ingredient of a situation, determines how much stereotype threat a person can feel. To answer this question, they designed an experiment where a group of men and women college students watch a set of 6 television commercials. For half of the students, group A, the commercials included women depicted in gender stereotypical ways, and for the other half, group B, the commercials had no gendered content. After watching the commercials, each student was asked to do as many verbal and math problems as they wanted. The results show that the women in group A chose fewer math problems to work on, performed worse, and reported being less interested in math-related college majors and careers than the women in group B. The same results were replicated across different settings with different minority groups. They also found that stereotype threat is triggered and influences the choices of girls as young as 5 and 7 years old.

What triggers the stereotype threat?

With all the mounting evidence of the effects of stereotype threat, the author and his research group set out to find out what determines how much stereotype threat a person feels in a setting? They argue that the slightest cue, often innocent appearing cues that seem to be a natural unavoidable ingredient of a situation, determines how much stereotype threat a person can feel. To answer this question, they designed an experiment where a group of men and women college students watch a set of 6 television commercials. For half of the students, group A, the commercials included women depicted in gender stereotypical ways, and for the other half, group B, the commercials had no gendered content. After watching the commercials, each student was asked to do as many verbal and math problems as they wanted. The results show that the women in group A chose fewer math problems to work on, performed worse, and reported being less interested in math-related college majors and careers than the women in group B. The same results were replicated across different settings with different minority groups. They also found the stereotype threat is triggered and influences the choices of girls as young as 5 and 7 years old.

What to do about it?

Claude does not leave us with a dark picture, he suggests some strategies, backed by laboratory experiments, to mitigate the effects of stereotype threats. On the intellectual ability of the minorities. Two of the strategies can be implemented by educational institutions and the last strategy can be implemented by the students themselves. The strategies are: 1) Hiring staff members from minority backgrounds or at least inviting visitors from minority backgrounds. The author argues that when undergraduate students see their group being represented, they lose the burden of disproving the stereotype threat related to their group. 2) Organizing mentoring sessions for the minority students where the mentors are from the same background as the mentees and to boost the idea of expandable intelligence through learning and trying over the idea of fixed intelligence. 3) The third suggested strategy is positive self-affirmation. By focusing on the core values that are most important to the students, they shift their focus from the stereotype threat to what they are interested in and hence they direct their cognitive resources on what they care about.

Online communities for minorities in academia:

Since I finished reading the book, I’ve been trying to find online groups for women and minorities in academia and found the following communities: Women in Academia Support Network (#WIASN): The group aims to provide a safer space for all women in academia at every level to support each other, to build networks and to share knowledge, to enable women to better navigate academia, and to support women in their various roles inside and outside the academy. The group is a close Facebook Group but joining the community through filing a form is available. https://www.wiasn.com/ The academic Woman: is a community that published stories of women in academia in a monthly journal. They also have a podcast (coming soon). They also organize a once a month Zoom call for the members (coming soon). https://theacademicwoman.co.uk/ For other minorities, like colored students, the Leading Routes organization is organizing “Black in Academia’’ campaign which aims at further the conversation of the under-representation of colored and black people in academia. They also provide internships for undergraduate students from African or Caribbean backgrounds. They also organize workshops and mentoring sessions. https://leadingroutes.org/bia Workshop on Women and Underrepresented Minorities in NLP (WiNLP): For natural language processing (NLP) specialization, this workshop has been running as part of the ACL conference since 2016 where papers with first authors are females or students from outside the US or Europe gets published. http://www.winlp.org/

There is still more work to be done to include women and underrepresented groups in academia but we can start with taking initiatives ourselves and organize these groups to support one another.