Peer reviewed article on stereotype threat and pronouns needed

[OchonAgusOchonOh]

I have found myself on th eEDI committee at work and am on the inclusiveness sub-committee. I expect at our next meeting it will be suggested that we encourage pronoun usage in email signatures.

Can any of you lovely people refer me to peer reviewed articles on stereo threat and how drawing attention to a woman's sex can have a detrimental effect on a woman's career progression? I'm currently having a look through google scholar but there is a massive amount of stuff that is mainly about trans people rather than the effect on women. Ideally I need peer reviewed and evidence based rather than opinion pieces.

https://sex-matters.org/posts/updates/pronouns/

To start you off... (or, indeed, rereading that, it may be enough - very thorough, as usual).

Thanks. That is helpful and will be useful to articulate arguments. However, I also need academic articles. I work in a university so we're all academics on this sub-committee and any opinion, other than the "be nice" one would get a request for peer reviewed research.

I also should have mentioned I'm in Ireland so UK law is not relevant.

I've had a look and, like you, not found anything "neatly", directly relevant.

But I'd suggest that a lack of explicit research intro the direct impact of pronoun use on women in this particular context would be, itself, an argument for caution in the context of the well-established existence of the stereotype threat - and perhaps also an indication of proportionate disregard for this demographic's needs. That may sound a little twee, but I don't think it's irrelevant here...

Have you searched on Google Scholar?

This is the first result upon searching "stereotype threat women":

scholarship.richmond.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1244&&context=jepson-faculty-publications&&sei-redir=1&referer=https%253A%252F%252Fscholar.google.com%252Fscholar%253Fhl%253Den%2526as_sdt%253D0%25252C5%2526q%253Dstereotype%252Bthreat%252Bwomen%2526oq%253Dstereotype%252Bthreat%252B#search=%22stereotype%20threat%20women%22

@DrSpartacularsMagnificentOctopus Yes, I've been looking at google scholar but I'm struggling to find anything that looks at the impact of drawing attention to a woman's sex in the workplace.

That is an interesting article but none of the cues referred to in it include drawing attention to your sex triggering stereotype threat. I could argue that drawing attention to sex coupled with lack of women at senior level might but I suspect the answer to that would be to encourage those women who are at a senior level to include pronouns for a reverse cue, as it were. To be honest, and I speak as one, academics can be a pain in the arse.

This is about impacts on hiring, not existing employment, but might be useful nonetheless:

Gonzalez, Cortina & Rodriguez (2019) The Role of Gender Stereotypes in Hiring: a field experiment. European Sociological Review, 35(2), 187–204

Thanks. It does look like I will have to do some extrapolation with "potential" and "possible" claims.

I've just scanned that one and it looks like I could easily extrapolate from that.

I suspect I won't find anything on the impact of pronouns on women specifically.

I don't have the DOI, but there's a paper based on girls taking maths tests that shows that just reminding a girl that she is a girl causes her to underperform.

Brilliant. Found it https://bpspsychub.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1348/000709906X113662?casatoken=cVfIE7YW1IAAAAA%3AbNM-iBqOQJu-0k4822hrohBiIoz-n-LSTPTOqB93wDHtZwtemN1kg5DnOOKYZ57JSZOKtOiLvDf1Y

Another one about adults here - https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0022103198913737

I'm not an expert in this field but I think the technical name for the work you are looking for is 'priming' and sex categories.

For example this one. When women are primed to think about their sex they perform worse on a spatial awareness test than when they focus on a different aspect of their identity (to do with college membership). Effect is not there for men as this is to do with mitigating stereotype threat, which men don't suffer from in this context. A bit of extrapolation required to the workforce, but you could argue that spatial awareness is a male-coded activity so therefore any male-coded activity in the workplace is likely to see a similar effect - women perform better when their sex is not made salient.

www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0193397306000797?casa_token=6Ng1sE7lPtIAAAAA:uQYtKYIKWB5aW8_w1f6UHTf9oeMx76Wh9__otOH4E5Ctfyo26eU29a5nv2NqxPTp0PwllpTnsw

https://www.nationalnumeracy.org.uk/news/girls-can-do-anything-they-put-their-minds-especially-maths

"In fact even just having to tick a box to say whether you’re male or female before sitting a maths test, has a negative effect on girls’ results."

Still can't find the paper.

Not quite the same, because that paper has the students read statements about whether girls suck at maths. I'm looking for the source for that National Numeracy assertion that just ticking the F box causes a performance downturn.

You might find DOI 10.1080/15298868.2012.687012 by Shen Zhang et al relevant. tl;dr: When women take a maths test under a pseudonym, they perform better, regardless of whether the pseudonym is male or female. Men don't experience this effect.

Another thread about ableism https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/womens_rights/4904772-useful-academic-paper-use-of-preferred-pronouns-are-ableist

You could also look for the studies on cv evaluation where a cv with a female name is judged as worse than the same cv with a male name.

and the anecdote of a tech support guy who put a female name to sign off his emails for a week and was astounded at the level of hostility he faced.

https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/what-happened-when-a-man-signed-work-emails-using-a-female-name-for-a-week_n_58c2ce53e4b054a0ea6a4066 is the second.

That's all really helpful. Thank you.

If I find the publications from the numeracy study. I'll post the link here. It might be useful for someone else too.

I completely agree op. We have all these researchers and academics on our side for years decrying the state of the research. And yet none of them have done the research we need. I’ve no idea what SEGM are actually doing but they’ve been positioning themselves as the experts on the research since 2019 and yet why haven’t they produced any of the research we need?

This could be the one "Stereotype Susceptibility: Identity Salience and Shifts in Quantitative Performance" Shih et al 1999.

Not the one, but interesting "Math is hard! The effect of gender priming on womens attitudes"

This isn’t what you asked for but I always point out that stating your pronouns forcing people to either out themselves or to assertively state what they are not (they think they are). It’s convoluted, but I like to shut it down.

They sound interesting. I'll check them out.

That's true but it won't be compelled. The individual touting this will argue strongly against that based on a student survey we did where one or maybe two students liked seeing staff including pronouns and that it makes them feel included.

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/j.1559-1816.2008.00362.x

Stereotype Threat in Applied Settings Re-Examined, Danaher and Crandall, 2008.

Encouraging pronoun use is encouraging in-the-closet trans people to either lie or out themselves, a form of coercion that isn't acceptable at work.

It pressures those who are unsure of their gender feelings to "nail their colours to the mast" before they have made up their minds.

Having most people state pronouns also forces GC people to either lie about and deny, or stand out like sore thumbs and have colleagues infer their stance on, a belief that is both legally-protected and controversial.

It needs to be either quietly dropped or the word "optional" stated very clearly.