Clearing The Air: Gender Stereotypes

Article 1: Target Article
Davies, P. G., Spencer, S. J., & Steele, C. M. (2005). Clearing the air: Identity safety moderates the effects of stereotype threat on women's leadership aspirations. Journal Of Personality And Social Psychology, 88(2), 276-287. doi:10.1037/0022-3514.88.2.276
Davies and colleagues explored how stereotype threat could potentially decrease the decision for women to accept leadership positions. The authors predicted that from watching gender stereotypic TV commercials, the women would choose to take helping roles versus leadership roles. In the first study, there were 30 men and 31 women randomly placed into groups where they were selected to watch the gender-neutral or gender stereotypic commercials. They then read
Specifically, the authors focused on the negative stereotypes of older adults, which included doing worse on cognitive and physical tasks. The authors reviewed age based stereotype threat literature, 22 published and 10 unpublished articles, testing the same research topic. They also researched a variety of manipulations of the research topic, such as including fact-based, experimental-based, gender, cultural and economic status with the age-based stereotype threat. Overall, the conclusions came out to show clear evidence that older adults’ cognitive performance and memory is negatively affected by threat from age stereotypes, even across different genders and ethnicity. Also, older adults are more likely to be threatened by stereotype-based manipulations than fact-based. Further research is encouraged to find out the extent of age-based stereotypes, like if it affects working memory more or less. This literature review contributed to how stereotypes of groups can directly affect people in a negative
Also, they examined how assessments of those women by the viewers are influenced by their attitudes towards women. There were two similar studies that investigated how women characters in advertisements are judged when they are shown as stereotypical or not. 64 women and 43 men chose to participate in the first study, an online questionnaire, which included questions that were intended to measure either hostile sexism or benevolent sexism toward women. Participants were then shown 2 pictures of stereotypical women and 2 pictures of non-stereotypical women in a randomized order, where participants evaluated them with four 6-point scales, such as useless-valuable. 72 women and 36 men participated in the second online survey similar to the one in the first study, changing small things to make a more controlled study. The first study showed that the stereotypical women in the advertisements were assessed more positively than the women who were not shown as stereotypical. Also, the results showed that benevolent sexism exhibited to be a good interpreter for the assessment of stereotypical female characters, whereas hostile sexism had no effect on assessing non-stereotypical female characters. The second study showed the same results, except for hostile sexism did show to be a good interpreter of assessments of women