Although science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) disciplines as a whole have made advances in gender parity and greater inclusion for women, these increases have been smaller or nonexistent in computing and engineering compared to other fields. In this focused review, we discuss how stereotypic perceptions of computing and engineering influence who enters, stays, and excels in these fields. We focus on communal goal incongruity–the idea that some STEM disciplines like engineering and computing are perceived as less aligned with people's communal goals of collaboration and helping others. In Part 1, we review the empirical literature that demonstrates how perceptions that these disciplines are incongruent with communal goals can especially deter women and girls, who highly endorse communal goals. In Part 2, we extend this perspective by reviewing accumulating evidence that perceived communal goal incongruity can deter any individual who values communal goals. Communal opportunities within computing and engineering have the potential to benefit first generation college students, underrepresented minority students, and communally-oriented men (as well as communally-oriented women). We describe the implications of this body of literature: describing how opting out of STEM in order to pursue fields perceived to encourage the pursuit of communal goals leave the stereotypic (mis)perceptions of computing and engineering unchanged and exacerbate female underrepresentation. In Part 3, we close with recommendations for how communal opportunities in computing and engineering can be highlighted to increase interest and motivation. By better integrating and publically acknowledging communal opportunities, the stereotypic perceptions of these fields could gradually change, making computing and engineering more inclusive and welcoming to all.

Stereotype threat (ST) research has focused exclusively on how negative group stereotypes reduce performance. The present work examines if pejorative stereotypes about women in math inhibit their ability to learn the mathematical rules and operations necessary to solve math problems. In Experiment 1, women experiencing ST had difficulty encoding math-related information into memory and, therefore, learned fewer mathematical rules and showed poorer math performance than did controls. In Experiment 2, women experiencing ST while learning modular arithmetic (MA) performed more poorly than did controls on easy MA problems; this effect was due to reduced learning of the mathematical operations underlying MA. In Experiment 3, ST reduced women's, but not men's, ability to learn abstract mathematical rules and to transfer these rules to a second, isomorphic task. This work provides the first evidence that negative stereotypes about women in math reduce their level of mathematical learning and demonstrates that reduced learning due to stereotype threat can lead to poorer performance in negatively stereotyped domains.

Because of the increased cognitive resources required to process negations, past research has shown that explicit attitude measures are more sensitive to negations than implicit attitude measures. The current work demonstrated that the differential impact of negations on implicit and explicit attitude measures was moderated by (a) the extent to which the negation was made salient and (b) the amount of cognitive resources available during attitude formation. When negations were less visually salient, explicit but not implicit attitude measures reflected the intended valence of the negations. When negations were more visually salient, both explicit and implicit attitude measures reflected the intended valence of the negations, but only when perceivers had ample cognitive resources during encoding. Competing models of negation processing, schema-plus-tag and fusion, were examined to determine how negation salience impacts the processing of negations.

Stereotype threat (ST) refers to a situation in which a member of a group fears that her or his performance will validate an existing negative performance stereotype, causing a decrease in performance. For example, reminding women of the stereotype "women are bad at math" causes them to perform more poorly on math questions from the SAT and GRE. Performance deficits can be of several types and be produced by several mechanisms. We show that ST prevents perceptual learning, defined in our task as an increasing rate of search for a target Chinese character in a display of such characters. Displays contained two or four characters and half of these contained a target. Search rate increased across a session of training for a control group of women, but not women under ST. Speeding of search is typically explained in terms of learned "popout" (automatic attraction of attention to a target). Did women under ST learn popout but fail to express it? Following training, the women were shown two colored squares and asked to choose the one with the greater color saturation. Superimposed on the squares were task-irrelevant Chinese characters. For women not trained under ST, the presence of a trained target on one square slowed responding, indicating that training had caused the learning of an attention response to targets. Women trained under ST showed no slowing, indicating that they had not learned such an attention response.A cross all cultures that have been examined there is a persistent stereotype held by both men and women that "women are bad at math." This stereotype is consequential: Women's math achievement and performance is lower in cultures where this stereotype is stronger (1). Although there are many reasons why women underperform at math, one important factor that affects not only math performance but also career choices and career achievement is stereotype threat: The mental and behavioral states that accompany the activation of this stereotype in women (2). Most notably, when this stereotype is activated in women's minds, they worry about confirming this pejorative stereotype and their math performance drops (3-5). Similar findings exist for other performance stereotypes held about other populations (5-7). The reasons for the performance drop are not entirely clear. Perhaps some kind of general anxiety causes a general decrement in women's math performance (8). Stereotype threat (ST) has been shown to increase arousal (9), increase negative thoughts (3, 10), decrease cognitive resources (5), and increase the perseverance of incorrect problem-solving strategies (11-13); all of these reactions partially explain performance decrements. Given the varied negative responses to threat, it seems a natural extrapolation to guess that it might inhibit women's ability to learn new information. That theory is the target of the present research.Demonstrating that ST reduces or inhibits learning is important because it broadens the domain of ST and provides a specific unstudied mechanism by which ST impacts performance. ...

A promising way to mitigate inequality is by addressing students’ worries about belonging. But where and with whom is this social-belonging intervention effective? Here we report a team-science randomized controlled experiment with 26,911 students at 22 diverse institutions. Results showed that the social-belonging intervention, administered online before college (in under 30 minutes), increased the rate at which students completed the first year as full-time students, especially among students in groups that had historically progressed at lower rates. The college context also mattered: The intervention was effective only when students’ groups were afforded opportunities to belong. This study develops methods for understanding how student identities and contexts interact with interventions. It also shows that a low-cost, scalable intervention generalizes its effects to 749 4-year institutions in the United States.