Inquiring Gender Before Math Test Results in Worse Performance in Females and Improved Performance in Males

Source: www.eta.org

As Cordelia Fine puts it in her book, Delusions of Gender: How Our Minds, Society, and Neurosexism Create Difference, “When the environment makes gender salient, there is a ripple effect on the mind. We start to think of ourselves in terms of our gender, and stereotypes and social expectations become more prominent in the mind. This can change self-perception, alter interests, debilitate or enhance ability, and trigger unintentional discrimination. In other words, the social context influences who you are, how you think, and what you do. And these thoughts, attitudes, and behaviors of yours, in turn, become part of the social context.” 

“‘Although women, on average, do not appear to have more empathic ability than men, there is compelling evidence that women will display greater accuracy than men when their empathic motivation is engaged by situational cues that remind them that they, as women, are expected to excel at empathy-related tasks,’…The take home message of these studies is that we can’t separate people’s empathizing ability and motivation from the social situation. The salience of cultural expectations about gender and empathizing interacts with a mind that knows to which gender it belongs” (Fine).

“Sex differences in empathy emerge in infancy and persist throughout development, though the gap between adult women and men is larger than between girls and boys,” (Eliot).  This shows that differences in gender may be innate, but these differences are exaggerated and the gap is widened with age.  This means that society is forcing these ideals onto each gender of how they are supposed to behave, so they follow their respective social norm.