Girls and the Leaky Math Pipeline

Women are still underrepresented in math-intensive fields like computer science or engineering. Math-gender stereotypes have been identified to diminish both math performance and math interest in women. Petra Jelenec investigated implicit math-gender stereotypes in children and adolescents with Implicit Association Tests (IATs) and Go/No-Go Association Tasks (GNATs). In a large German sample, implicit math-gender stereotypes could be detected predominantly in girls. Girls at the age of 9 years already revealed implicit math-gender stereotypes, and for adolescent girls, those implicit stereotypes were related to academic outcome variables like ability self-concepts and school grades in math and German. Further, implicit math-gender stereotypes turned out to be context-dependent. Female university students showed a stronger implicit math-male bias after completing a difficult math test that was described in a stereotypical manner. This book is intended for readers interested in implicit social cognition and stereotype research.