This is the first instalment of the Charlatan‘s research blog, which examines new and interesting research conducted at Carleton.
Researchers at Carleton’s political science department, Julie Blais and Scott Pruysers, published a paper June 18 called, “Anything women can do men can do better: An experiment examining the effects of stereotype threat on political knowledge and efficacy.”
The aim of the paper was to examine how negative stereotypes affect political shrewdness in women, a predicament known as stereotype threat, according to the researchers. The Charlatan’s Alexa d’Addario caught up with the two researchers via email to ask them about the study.
The Charlatan (TC): Where did you get the idea to study gender sterotypes in politics?
Scott Pruysers (SP): When the project began, Julie was in the Department of Psychology studying psychopaths and offenders while I was in the Department of Political Science studying political parties. We had been dating for a number of years and thought it was be great to combine our disciplines and write a paper together.
Julie then told me about a concept from psychology called stereotype threat. This theory suggests that negative stereotypes can reduce cognitive functioning, create stress and anxiety, and ultimately result in poor test performance for a wide range of subjects. It has been used in the past to demonstrate that women are not actually worse at math than their male counterparts. Instead, stereotypes about women’s mathematic ability result in poor test performance.
Julie Blais (JB): There is a persistent knowledge gap between men and women in terms of political knowledge. We have very little insight into why it persists despite women’s advances in educational attainment, workforce participation, and levels of income.
Our goal was to determine whether women under perform on knowledge tests due to widespread stereotypes about their political knowledge. Women also tend to have lower levels of confidence in their abilities to understand politics, therefore, we also assessed the effect of stereotypes on women’s confidence, also called political efficacy.
TC: What was the research process like?
JB: This research was conducted using the a pool of undergraduate students from the psychology department. A total of 226 students (men and women) were randomly assigned to receive one of two conditions, a stereotype threat condition and a non-threat condition. Participants were also asked the degree to which they agreed with the following statement: “Sometimes politics and government seem so complicated that a person like me can’t really understand what’s going on.”
If stereotype explains the political knowledge gap, we would expect women to score lower than men in the threat condition, BUT score the same as men in the non-threat condition. We would expect the same pattern of results for the political confidence statement.
TC: What were your findings?
SP: We found that men outperform women in tests of political knowledge.
While we expected women to perform just as well as men in the non-threat condition, this was not the case. Here, men outperformed women as well . This suggests that negative stereotypes are not at the root of the gender gap in political knowledge. Even when removing the threat, women still performed worse than men. While our hypothesis was wrong, this does add to the literature nonetheless. There is already a long list of explanations that simply do not work, we have added stereotype threat to this list.
TC: How does this study impact our understanding of gender gaps in politics?
JB:
1) This adds to the list of possible explanations that simply do not explain the knowledge gap between men and women.
2) The potential for stereotype lift suggests that men may experience enhanced confidence due to negative stereotypes about women.
3) If we want women to be full participants in the political arena, we need to discover why this knowledge gap persists and the factors that are contributing to women’s low confidence in their political abilities.
4) While negative stereotypes do not account for the knowledge gap, it is possible that negative stereotypes account for other gender gaps in politics (e.g., political ambition).
Further research is therefore needed.
TC: Thank you for your time.
This interview has been shortened and edited for publication.
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