Math = male, me = female, therefore math ≠ me.

By Brian A. Nosek, Mahzarin R. Banaji, A. Greenwald. 2002

812 citations recorded by the source corpus.

College students, especially women, demonstrated negativity toward math and science relative to arts and language on implicit measures. Group membership (being female), group identity (self female), and gender stereotypes (math male) were related to attitudes and identification with mathematics. Stronger implicit math male stereotypes corresponded with more negative implicit and explicit math attitudes for women but more positive attitudes for men. Associating the self with female and math with male made it difficult for women, even women who had selected math-intensive majors, to associate math with the self. These results point to the opportunities and constraints on personal preferences that derive from membership in social groups. When the New York Times interviewed the three living female descendants of Elizabeth Cady Stanton, the focus was not on the indisputable mark she had left on American society but rather the effect she had had on her own family (Bumiller, 1998). The accomplishments of this housewife who organized the historic 1848 Seneca Falls convention to demand the right of women to vote were visible even in the careers of her own daughters and their daughters. The youngest of the women interviewed, also named Elizabeth and 13 years old at the time, said that she would like to be an engineer or an architect, following in the footsteps of her grandmother and great-grandmother. Although she showed cognizance of the hurdles that stood in the way of her ancestor’s battle for a simple equality, she was optimistic about the present, remarking that now “anything’s possible for anyone” (p. B6). The idea that anything ought to be possible for anyone is the foundation of many proclamations of equality, such as the constitutions of nations and their legal codes. Yet, as even a superficial historical glance reveals, demarcations of humans into social groups and their unequal access to resources have been the primary impetus for theory and action to achieve social justice. As psychologists, we are interested in the mechanisms by which aspirations for equality are undermined—not by a lack of legal protection but in the more basic social and mental processes that determine individual preferences and choices. The operation of such processes can be subversive—they appear to reflect a free and individually determined choice when in fact they reflect group membership, the strength of identity with the group, and beliefs about the capability of the group. In this article, we focus on the fundamental dichotomy of gender as we investigate preferences for mathematics (and science) versus the arts (and language). The covariation between gender and orientation toward math and science is well known: Men are assumed to be and demonstrated to be more inclined to participate

Subfields: Experimental and Cognitive Psychology, Social Psychology, Sociology and Political Science, Safety, Robustness & Interpretability

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Citations in the corpus

StereoSet: Measuring stereotypical bias in pretrained language models (2020, neutral): “We collect gender terms from Nosek et al. (2002).”
Semantics derived automatically from language corpora contain human-like biases (2016, methodology): “In another laboratory study, Nosek et al. (2002b) found that female terms are less associated with the sciences, and male terms less associated with the arts.”
On Measuring Social Biases in Sentence Encoders (2019, background): “Observing similar p-values agrees with intuition: The math/art association should be similar to the science/art association because they instantiate a disciplinary dichotomy between math/science and arts/language (Nosek et al., 2002).”
Black Americans' Implicit Racial Associations And Their Implications for Intergroup Judgment (2003, background): “Indeed, mounting evidence suggests that many—though not all—black individuals do hold outgroup–favoring associations at the implicit level (Livingston, 2002; Nosek et al., 2002; Spicer, 1999).”
Math achievement, stereotypes, and math self-concepts among elementary-school students in Singapore (2015, methodology): “To test whether implicit and explicit stereotypes were related to math self-concepts and math achievement, we used a statistical approach developed by Nosek et al. (2002) to examine similar relationships in adults.”
The Effects of a Female Role Model on Academic Performance and Persistence of Women in STEM Courses (2016, background): “Research on women in STEM fields has indicated that they are aware of the stereotype about the gender gap in mathematical ability (e.g., Jones et al., 1984; Miyake et al., 2010; Nosek et al., 2002; Ramsey & Sekaquaptewa, 2011; Steele, James, & Barnett, 2002).”
Stereotypes About Gender and Science (2016, background): “Moreover, research has found that liking math (Nosek et al., 2002) and the intention to pursue a STEM major or career was associated with implicit stereotypes associating men with scientists (Lane et al., 2012).”
The effects of an academic environment intervention on science identification among women in STEM (2013, background): “Women and girls also tend to identify with math and science domains less than men and boys do (Jacobs et al. 2002; Nosek et al. 2002).”
TARGET ARTICLE: Attributions of Implicit Prejudice, or "Would Jesse Jackson 'Fail' the Implicit Association Test?" (2004, neutral): “Nosek, Banaji, and Greenwald (2002b) seemed to agree: “A stereotype may be maintained outside conscious awareness although it is neither wanted nor endorsed consciously, yet still influence both consciously and unconsciously held attitudes” (p. 55).”
Gender differences in the contribution patterns of equity-crowdfunding investors (2017, result): “…studies suggests that women in male-dominated fields (and other minorities in similar positions) might behave with a gender-induced bias and favor members of dominant groups at similar rates to those of the dominant group (e.g., Moss-Racusin et al. 2012; Nosek et al. 2002; Milkman et al. 2015).”
Majoring in STEM—What Accounts for Women's Career Decision Making? A Mixed Methods Study (2014, background): “Female students in the social sciences and humanities (SSH) served as a reference group because this provides a contrasting category to mathematics and science (Nosek et al., 2002).”