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About 70% of more than half a million Implicit Association Tests completed by citizens of 34 countries revealed expected implicit stereotypes associating science with males more than with females. We discovered that nation-level implicit stereotypes predicted nation-level sex differences in 8th-grade science and mathematics achievement. Self-reported stereotypes did not provide additional predictive validity of the achievement gap. We suggest that implicit stereotypes and sex differences in science participation and performance are mutually reinforcing, contributing to the persistent gender gap in science engagement.Implicit Association Test ͉ culture ͉ social psychology ͉ implicit social cognition

About 70% of more than half a million Implicit Association Tests completed by citizens of 34 countries revealed expected implicit stereotypes associating science with males more than with females. We discovered that nation-level implicit stereotypes predicted nation-level sex differences in 8th-grade science and mathematics achievement. Self-reported stereotypes did not provide additional predictive validity of the achievement gap. We suggest that implicit stereotypes and sex differences in science participation and performance are mutually reinforcing, contributing to the persistent gender gap in science engagement.

Gender stereotypes about math and science do not need to be endorsed, or even available to conscious introspection, to contribute to the sex gap in engagement and achievement in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM). The authors examined implicit math attitudes and stereotypes among a heterogeneous sample of 5,139 participants. Women showed stronger implicit negativity toward math than men did and equally strong implicit gender stereotypes. For women, stronger implicit math=male stereotypes predicted greater negativity toward math, less participation, weaker self-ascribed ability, and worse math achievement; for men, those relations were weakly in the opposite direction. Implicit stereotypes had greater predictive validity than explicit stereotypes. Female STEM majors, especially those with a graduate degree, held weaker implicit math=male stereotypes and more positive implicit math attitudes than other women. Implicit measures will be a valuable tool for education research and help account for unexplained variation in the STEM sex gap.T he mere fact that women are less likely than men to pursue and persist in many science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) college majors and careers is widely recognized; but why the sex gap occurs is the focus of BRIAN A. NOSEK is an associate professor in the . He investigates the relation between implicit social cognition and academic and career preferences, performance and persistence.

Women's representation in science has changed substantially, but unevenly, over the past 40 years. In health and biological sciences, for example, women's representation among U.S. scientists is now on par with or greater than men's, while in physical sciences and engineering they remain a clear minority. We investigated whether variation in proportions of women in scientific disciplines is related to differing levels of male-favoring explicit or implicit stereotypes held by students and scientists in each discipline. We hypothesized that science-is-male stereotypes would be weaker in disciplines where women are better represented. This prediction was tested with a sample of 176,935 college-educated participants (70% female), including thousands of engineers, physicians, and scientists. The prediction was supported for the explicit stereotype, but not for the implicit stereotype. Implicit stereotype strength did not correspond with disciplines' gender ratios, but, rather, correlated with two indicators of disciplines' scientific intensity, positively for men and negatively for women. From age 18 on, women who majored or worked in disciplines perceived as more scientific had substantially weaker science-is-male stereotypes than did men in the same disciplines, with gender differences larger than 0.8 standard deviations in the most scientifically-perceived disciplines. Further, particularly for women, differences in the strength of implicit stereotypes across scientific disciplines corresponded with the strength of scientific values held by women in the disciplines. These results are discussed in the context of dual process theory of mental operation and balanced identity theory. The findings point to the need for longitudinal study of the factors' affecting development of adults' and, especially, children's implicit gender stereotypes and scientific identity.

Abstract. Recent theoretical and methodological innovations suggest a distinction between implicit and explicit evaluations. We applied Campbell and Fiske's (1959) classic multitrait-multimethod design precepts to test the construct validity of implicit attitudes as measured by the Implicit Association Test (IAT). Participants (N = 287) were measured on both self-report and IAT for up to seven attitude domains. Through a sequence of latent-variable structural models, systematic method variance was distinguished from attitude variance, and a correlated two-factors-per-attitude model (implicit and explicit factors) was superior to a single-factor-per-attitude specification. That is, despite sometimes strong relations between implicit and explicit attitude factors, collapsing their indicators into a single attitude factor resulted in relatively inferior model fit. We conclude that these implicit and explicit measures assess related but distinct attitude constructs. This provides a basis for, but does not distinguish between, dual-process and dual-representation theories that account for the distinctions between constructs. Keywords: implicit social cognition, attitudes, individual differences, construct validity, structural equation modelingRealizing that the human mind is more than the sum of its conscious processes, a number of theorists have proposed a conceptual distinction between evaluations that are the products of introspection, called explicit attitudes, and those that occur automatically and may exist outside of conscious awareness, called implicit attitudes (Greenwald & Banaji, 1995;Wilson, Lindsey, & Schooler, 2000). Greenwald and Banaji (1995, p. 8), for example, defined implicit attitudes as "introspectively unidentified (or inaccurately identified) traces of past experience that mediate favorable or unfavorable feelings toward an attitude object." This theory has developed in conjunction with the invention of measurement tools that assess automatic evaluative associations without introspection (e.g., Fazio, Sanbonmatsu, Powell, & Kardes, 1986;Greenwald, McGhee, & Schwartz, 1998;Nosek & Banaji, 2001;Wittenbrink, Judd, & Park, 1997).Some experiences with these new measurement tools have spawned doubts about whether they measure attitudes at all (Karpinski & Hilton, 2001), and whether a conceptual distinction between implicit and explicit attitudes is worthwhile (Fazio & Olson, 2003). Fazio and Olson contend "it is more appropriate to view the measures as implicit or explicit, not the attitude (or whatever other construct)" (2003, p. 303). The purpose of the research we report was to test whether the structure of attitude variance derived from an implicit measure (the Implicit Association Test [IAT]; Greenwald et al., 1998) and from an explicit one (semantic differentials) is best represented by one latent factor or by two correlated latent factors, when stripped of confounding method variance. If our hypothesis that the latter specification will fit the data better is sustained, it will support a view ...

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