Racism and Gender in Science: My IAT Results

Along with most other people out there, I would like to think that I know my attitudes towards race and gender pretty well. At least that’s what I think superficially. Being Hispanic, I feel like I’m pretty confident that I don’t discriminate or feel prejudice towards those of a different race. My two best friends are black and white. I would like to think I’m fair in my opinion that women can be good at science just as well , if not more so, than men being a chemistry major here at Southwestern. Thinking about chemistry majors that I know within my year, there are five men and four women. However, when it comes to biology majors that I can think of, the number of women far exceeds the number of men.

All in all, I wanted to see what my levels of modern racism and I guess for the sake of this blog, modern sexism would be. Modern racism if defined as a form of prejudice that surfaces in subtle ways when it is safe, socially acceptable, and easy to rationalize (Hass, Katz, Rizzo, Bailey, and Moore, 1992). I’m expanding this to sexism (specifically in science) as well, which is the prejudice and discrimination based on a person’s gender (Stangor, Lynch, Changming, and Glass, 1992). In hindsight, I feel like I sometimes partake in implicit racism when I’m out at a restaurant or out and about. Implicit racism is the activation and application of stereotypes without conscious awareness (Eberhardt, Davies, Purdie-Vaughns, and Johnson, 2006). So to determine how I subconsciously feel about both of these areas, I took the Implicit Association Tests (IAT) for Race and Gender-Science.

The IAT measures unconscious attitudes by measuring the speed at which people associate pairs of concepts (Greenwald, McGhee, and Schwartz, 1998). Things such as implicit racism and implicit sexism are, well, implicit attitudes: attitudes we aren’t aware of having (Fazio and Olson, 2003). To summarize what goes on in an IAT, the participant will categorize several association pairs as quickly as possible over several stages by typing either the E or I keys on the keyboard.

In addition to normal implicit attitudes and stereotypes, drinking has been shown to impair people’s control over stereotype activation and application (Bartholow, Dickter, and Sestir, 2006). I took the Race IAT twice, once without drinking and the second time after some time at Study Break to see if my implicit prejudice had changed. The Gender-Science IAT was taken only once before the trip to Study Break.

So I was pretty happy with my result for the Race IAT. My results showed that I have “little to no automatic preference between African American and European American.” The results make me glad to know that I know myself relatively decently in reference to my level of racism. I guess I could attribute the non-preference to the high school I attended, considering you could count the white students on two hands. However, despite my fairness pre-Study Break, the post-Study Break results showed that I have a “strong automatic preference for European American compared to African American.” I find this weird, but not really considering that our conscious attitudes may not always match our implicit attitudes.

The pre-Study Break results reminded me of the group of friends I had when I was in high school. Pardon the slang, but if one was to look at our group, we were two Hispanics, one black guy, one white guy, and one Asian guy. Only thing was that the “Asian” in our was a friend who was Hispanic but had slightly slanted eyes, so we kind of teased him about it, granted he was free to tease us as he saw fit as well. Basically, we made fun of each other a lot.

Anecdote aside, my results for the Gender-Science IAT kind of threw me for a loop. I thought that I was fair minded of having both sexes in the sciences, but my IAT results say otherwise. The results stated that I have a “strong association of Male with Science and Female with Liberal Arts compared to Female with Science and Male with Liberal Arts.” Evidently, deep down I think men should be in science more so than women, even though that isn’t the case consciously.

These results overall don’t change how I feel consciously about race or gender in science. Like I said, I’m glad to see that my results for the Race IAT confirmed how I feel, but did not agree with my results for the Gender-Science IAT. Now that I’ve taken these two tests, I kind of want to see what the others say about my implicit attitudes.

Bartholow, B.D., Dickter, C. L., & Sestir, M. A. (2006). Stereotype activation and control of race bias: Cognitive control of inhibition and its impairment by alcohol. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 90, 272-287.

Eberhardt, J. L., Davies, P. G., Purdie-Vaughns, V. J., & Johnson, S. L. (2006). Precieved stereotypicality of black defendants predicts capital-sentencing outcomes. Psychological Science, 17, 383-386.

Fazio, R. H., & Olson, M. A. (2003). Implicit measures in social cognition research: Their meaning and use. Annual Review of Psychology, 54, 297-327.

Greenwald, A. G., McGhee, D. E., & Schwartz, J. L. K., (1998). Measuring individual differences in implicit cognition: The implicit association test. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 74, 1464-1480.

Hass, R. G., Katz, L., Rizzo, N., Bailey, J., & Moore, L. (1992). When racial ambivalence evokes negative affect, using a disguised measure of mood. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 18, 786-797.

Stangor, C., Lynch, L., Changming, D., & Glass, B. (1992). Categorization of individuals on the basis of multiple social features. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 62, 207-218.