"As we learned in the previous chapter, women who are invested in masculine domains often have to perform in the unpleasant and unrewarding atmosphere created by stereotype threat. Anxiety, depletion of working memory, lowered expectations, and frustration can all ensue. But there is a solution, albeit a rather radical one. As Claude Steele observed, "women may reduce their stereotype threat substantially by moving across the hall from math to English class." Stereotype threat can do more than impair performance- it can also reduce interest in cross-gender activities. A striking demonstration of this was provided by Mary Murphy and her colleagues at Stanford University. Advanced math, science, and engineering (MSE) majors were asked to give their opinion on an advertising video "for an MSE summer leadership conference that Stanford was considering hosting the next summer." Under the cover story that the researchers were also interested in physiological reactions to the video, heart rate and skin conductance were recorded, to give a measure of arousal. After watching the ad, the students were asked questions to assess how much they felt they would belong at such a conference, and how interested they were in attending. There were two, near-identical videos, depicting about 150 people. However, in one video the ratio of men to women approximated the actual gender ratio of MSE degrees: there were three men to every woman. In the second video, men and women were featured in equal numbers. Women who saw the gender-equal which video responded very much like men, both physiologically and in their sense of belonging and interest in the conference. But for women who saw the more realistically imbalanced version, it was a very different experience. They became more aroused - an indicator of physiological vigilance. They expressed less interest in attending the conference when it was gender unbalanced. (Interestingly, so did men - although this was probably, one can't help but think, for different reasons.) And although women and men who saw the gender-equal balanced video very strongly agreed that they belonged there, the conviction of this agreement among women who saw a gender imbalance was significantly lower. Under the naturalistic condition of male dominance, they were no longer so sure that they belonged."
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