There have also been studies that have explored the effect of stereotype threat on women in math and science domains, such as the paper titled ‘Stereotype Threat and Arousal: Effects on Women's Math Performance’ (O'Brien & Crandall, 2003), this paper will help gather an idea of the effects of stereotype threat for women is STEM, and allow for a more in-depth look into how social psychology practises could be used to the advantage of this demographic. To full grasp how social psychology can be used to help alleviate the effects of stereotype threat first it is important to establish what situations tend to lead to stereotype threat. There are many situations that cause stereotype threat one such situation which has been found to have effects on a female demographic is solo or numerical minority status situations where one is or even just expects to be (Murphy, Steele, & Gross, 2007) the single representative of a stereotyped group or a numerical minority can create heightened group identity and stereotype threat. Women showed performance decrements on math tests (where there exists a stereotype of female inferiority), but only when they took the test in the …show more content…
The use of group education on perceived social stereotypes and their validity, coupled with group based reinforced learning would allow for a relatively effective and robust method of reducing stereotype threat and thus increasing the ability of women on STEM related tasks. From this there would also be positive lead on effects, such as reducing the number of women undertaking self-defeating practises, and helping to increase the ability of working memory in stressful and high anxiety settings. For these reasons, this approach towards eliminating the effect of stereotype bias on women in STEM would be one of the more effective process that could be