Self-fulfilling Prophecies

If you’re a woman and you subscribe to the stereotype that women are worse at physics than men, then help is at hand.

If you’re a woman and you subscribe to the stereotype that women are worse at physics than men, then help is at hand. All it takes is some positive writing practice. Women in physics classes tend to do worse than men, by and large. This new research, published in the journal Science, set out to look at the role of psychological factors. The researchers interviewed 399 students in an introductory physics class on whether they agreed with the ‘men are better at physics’ stereotype.

Half of these were chosen to perform a simple writing exercise: they had to choose values that they considered important, and write about why they mattered. They did this at the beginning of the semester, and before a mid term exam. The researchers found that in the control group, the one that did not do any such writing exercise, males performed much better than females. In the group that wrote at their ideals, however, the women saw their grades rise, considerably reducing the gap with men.