People experiencing stereotype threat are already trying hard. And to the benefit of us all, many people have stood up to these pressures.The focus here, instead, is on what has to be gotten out of he way to make these playing fields mere level. There is no development without effort and there is seldom great achievement, or boundary breaking, without stress. This is not an argument against trying hard, or against choosing the stressful path.

The culprit, in their case, is not their quantitative skills but, more likely, the prospect of living a significant portion of their lives in a domain where they may forever have to prove themselves-and with the chronic stress that goes with that. But when women drop out of quantitative majors in college it usually has nothing to do with their grades. When men drop out of quantitative majors in college, it is usually because they have bad grades. Jeff seemed to feel this way about Berkeley, that he couldn't find a place there where he could be seen as belonging. Disproving a stereotype is a Sisyphean task something you have to do over and over again as long as your are in the domain where the stereotype applies. And when you realize that this stressful experience is probably a chronic feature of the stetting for you, it can be difficult for you to stay in the setting, to sustain your motivation to succeed there. You are multitasking, and because the stakes involved are high-survival and success versus failure in an area that is important to you-this multitasking is stressful and distracting. In addition to learning new skills, knowledge, and ways of thinking in a schooling situation, or in addition to trying to perform well in a workplace like the women in the high-tech firms, you are also trying to slay a ghost in the room, the negative stereotype and its allegation about you and your group. “The problem is that the pressure to disprove a stereotype changes what you are about in a situation.

Whistling vivaldi by claude m steele