Stanford Corrects Harvard Regarding Gender-Based Performance in Math, Science, Engineering

Stanford University psychologists Mary Murphy and Claude Steele have conducted a study to be published in a journal of the Association for Psychological Science that shows that the social and institutional organization of math, science and engineering environments play a significant role in contributing to gender ratio imbalance in maths, sciences and engineering performance and careers.

Harvard University President Larry Summers recently made a statement that has gotten a lot of attention from academia and the general public. Summers suggested that women may not possess the same "innate ability" or "natural ability" in the mathematic and scientific fields as do men. His surprising remark has resulted in many professional academicians, university presidents and scientists making public requests for more women to join the ranks of mathematicians, scientists and engineers.

Further Murphy, Steel and colleagues have conducted studies to test the hypothesis that it is environment and not innate traits that limit the numbers of women in these fields. Previous research into disparities between women's and men's academic choices have focused on biological and socialization explanations. The new study suggests that the environment and the situational cues of the environment are significantly important in the explanation for the differences between women and men in performance and representation in maths, sciences and engineering.

Situational awareness, the mental representation of events and people in situations that allows you to know what is going on so that you know what to do or so that you can avoid being surprised, is facilitated by situational cues: the things that alert you to the dynamics and complexities in situations requiring human performance. Murphy and colleagues present evidence for the hypothesis that both women's actual performance and expected performance in these fields are influenced by situational cues. One particular cue that they emphasize is the perception of "being outnumbered," which relates to identity safety and identity threat.