Stereotype your way to Success?

Dr.Sue Hewitt

Women's Development Consultant
Milecastle Consultancy Ltd.

When women are told men have greater mathematical ability they tend to perform worse on mathematical tasks than when they are not made aware of this negative stereotype. Dr.Sue Hewitt wonders whether trainers can harness stereotyping positively.

Imagine how your life could be if you could become more successful simply by believing that 'people like you' were more likely to be successful than other groups. Imagine a world where we could overcome the debilitating consequences of sexism, racism, homophobia and the like by dealing with the issues of social identity. Welcome to the world of stereotyping where, when we associate ourselves with groups, we can both lose and win because others have done so before us.

A recent article in Scientific American summarised the research in this area. Stereotyping around age and gender are of particular interest to me as a development trainer working with women and older workers. I often find that some of the inertia holding people back is their belief that people from their particular group perform badly in certain areas. However an understanding of how stereotyping can affect performance is of interest to all trainers and managers.

The research shows that when women are made aware that men have greater mathematical ability they tend to perform worse on complex mathematical tasks than when they are not made aware of this stereotype. Also elderly people perform worse on memory tests after being made aware of the association of aging with deteriorating cognitive ability. The stereotype 'threat' extends to athletic performance as well, with expert golfers leaving putts further from the target when exposed to a detrimental gender stereotype.

I wonder how many people arrive at training and development programmes believing that people in their particular group 'don’t do well on these courses'. In some soft skills and direct job related areas, I bet it’s a significant proportion. If trainers could learn to understand how stereotyping works, then surely it could be used to their advantage, challenging the debilitating stereotype and installing new helpful programming.

The Process

If you believe that you come from an underperforming group then you will be more likely to be telling yourself 'this is hard' and 'I’m not good at this' when engaged in a task. These anxious thoughts use up information processing resources that could otherwise be allocated to the task at hand. If you shift the process emphasis from short-term verbal reasoning to long-term memory, such as learning by rote, then performance improves.

But this is not all of the story, because where there are competing positive and negative stereotypes we can be more influenced by the positive one. Asian women will perform better in mathematical tests when made aware of a stereotype that Asians are better at maths than other ethnic groups, whilst also being aware of the negative gender stereotype mentioned earlier.

Performance improvement of this kind cannot easily be explained in terms of cognitive load. There are also other shortcomings of this theory: not all members of the underperforming stereotypical group will underperform; and there is stereotype threat even in areas where cognitive capacity is not critical, such as sporting performance.

Social Identity

Maybe the problem is not cognitive but associated with identity. If I choose to see myself as part of the underperforming group (or value that group), then I am more likely to underperform. However, again, this is not all of the story. We tend to think positively towards our own group, but when faced with conflict - where our motivations to do well are at odds with our perceived social identity - anxiety arises.

We will perform best when what we are and what we want to be as individuals is fully compatible with what we perceive ourselves to be as group members.

Lifting Performance

Are we condemned to always act out the stereotypes? Not at all. When confronted with obstacles to self-enhancement there are helpful tools.

Amongst the best of these tools is to invoke in-group stereotypes that deflect the impact of belonging to the disadvantaged group. This boils down to who you compare yourself to. If you describe yourself as a logical thinker and you are a woman then you are more likely to achieve the mathematical prowess of logical thinkers than the poor mathematical performance of women.

Another alternative is for the group to challenge the stereotype by taking on the world in the way that Nelson Mandela and Emmeline Pankhurst did.

Achieving Success in the Training Room

What the research tells us is that if people believe they come from an underperforming group then they are more likely to underachieve. As a trainer, by altering the dimensions of comparison, we have opportunities to raise performance and challenge stereotypes.

For example, a trainer could tell a group that managers from their particular organisation always find the course really useful, that people find the course helpful when looking for promotion or that people in their age group have useful experience to bring to the table. Trainers can work on installing positive stereotypes that will help trainees to achieve success. This may only be related to the small areas on which the trainer is working with the group, but if participants start to think about themselves differently, believing that they are part of the 'successful' group, then who knows what the long term results for their lives and careers may be.