What Is Stereotype Threat?

A lot of the original research was focused on showing that that kind of pressure can interfere with a person's functioning in general and in relation to specific performances as well. The one example that I think maybe most people would have heard of, if you've heard of anything, is about girls or women performing worse on tests of mathematical scalarability after they've been told that girls do worse at math. We did an experiment in which we took the stereotype threat pressure out of that situation for women taking that math test. And indeed the women, even though we matched them in the math ability with the men, underperformed on that difficult test compared to the men.