In addition to clogging up working memory, stereotype threat can also handicap the mind with a failure-prevention mindset. The mind turns from a focus on seeking success (being bold and creative) to a focus on avoiding failure, which involves being cautious, careful, and conservative (referred to as promotion focus and prevention focus, respectively).
The more I was treated as a woman, the more woman I became. I adapted willy-nilly. If I was assumed to be incompetent at reversing cars, or opening bottles, oddly incompetent I found myself becoming. If a case was thought too heavy for me, inexplicably I found it so myself.
In other words, both the descriptive (“women are gentle”) and the prescriptive (“women should be gentle”) elements of gender stereotypes create a problem for ambitious women.
The Australian writer Helen Garner noted that one can either “think of people as discrete bubbles floating past each other and sometimes colliding, or…see them overlap, seep into each other’s lives, penetrate the fabric of each other.”
As you will begin to appreciate, a mind that is struggling with negative stereotypes and anxious thoughts is not in a psychologically optimal state for doing taxing intellectual tasks. And it’s important to bear in mind that these jittery, self-defeating mechanisms are not characteristic of the female mind—they’re characteristic of the mind under threat.
The simple, brief experience of imagining oneself as another transformed both self-perception and, through this transformation, behavior. The maxim “fake it till you make it” gains empirical support.
Intriguingly, they found that across countries, over and above the effect of consciously reported stereotypes, the more strongly males are implicitly associated with science and females with liberal arts, the greater boys’ advantage in science and math in the eighth grade.