Opening doors through education.
Seeing is believing: Exposure to counterstereotypic women leaders and its effect on the malleability of automatic gender stereotyping. Nilanjana Dasgupta and Skaki Asgari, (2004). Journal of Experimental Social Psychology. Vol. 40, pp. 642-658.
Dasgupta and Asgari focused on the development of implicit gender stereotypes about leadership. They followed two groups of female college students, one at women’s colleges, one at coed colleges, across their first year. The researchers took a measure of the implicit bias toward men as leaders/women as supporters in students’ first semester and found that both groups evidenced this bias at comparable levels. After a year at their respective types of institutions, however, the implicit bias of the coed women grew stronger, while that of the women’s college students disappeared.
Why did implicit leadership stereotypes change differently at the two types of colleges? Dasgupta and Asgari found that the proportion of female faculty teaching the students’ classes—higher at the women’s college—accounted for the different changes in bias.
The take-home message? Implicit stereotypes, though automatic and not subject to (short-term) conscious control, will change if environments change. In this case, exposure to more women in leadership roles eroded the implicit leadership=male stereotype, while exposure to fewer women fueled it.