Three experiments examined the effects of exposure to
sexism on women's task performance, self-esteem, and
sense of belonging in an academic setting. In Experiment
1, female undergraduates who were about to participate
in a study were told by another female student who
supposedly was completing the study (actually, she was a
confederate of the experimenter) either that the male
experimenter was sexist (threat) or no mention was made
of the experimenter's attitudes towards women (control).
Subsequently, the experimenter then either provided
negative or positive feedback regarding students
performance on a set of "practice problems" that were
supposedly similar to ones they would have to answer
after receiving a brief tutorial. After receiving the
tutorial, students completed items similar to those used
in the analytical section of the GRE. Test performance
showed that women who thought the experimenter was
sexist performed more poorly than women in the condition
in which sexism was not mentioned. Feedback had no
effect of performance but did effect self-esteem; esteem
was lower when students had received negative feedback.
However, task performance was not affected by feedback.
In Experiment 2, male and female students were exposed
to the same sexism manipulation as in Experiment 1 but
there was no manipulation of feedback. Although women
again showed a tendency to perform more poorly when the
experimenter was supposedly sexist, men actually
performed better in the threat compared with the control
condition. Self-esteem was again unaffected by the
sexism manipulation, but women reported feeling less
comfortable in the testing situation when sexism had
been invoked. Experiment 3 varied the sex of the
confederate so that male and female students in the
threat conditions were informed by same-sex confederates
that the experimenter was sexist (i.e., implying sexist
against men for male students). Women again performed
more poorly with a supposedly sexist experimenter, but
men's performance was unaffected by this factor. Both
man and women felt less comfortable in the situation if
they thought the experimenter was exist, but self-esteem
was unaffected by supposed experimenter sexism. In sum,
these studies show that exposure to a sexist instructor
can harm women's task performance and reduce their sense
of comfort and belonging (but not necessarily their
self-esteem). Although men also showed a lowered sense
of belonging, their actual performance actually tended
to improve under perceived sexism (i.e., they showed
stereotype lift), perhaps because the gender stereotypes
are suggestive of males' superior reasoning ability.
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