Exploring Gender Identification Effects on Stereotype Threat

Stereotype threat impairs performance in situations where a stereotype holds that one’s social group will perform poorly. A study of women’s college students examined whether this effect influenced performance on spatial cognition tasks when participants were presented with threat on the basis of gender socialization. Transgender and cisgender participants, all designated female at birth, were randomly assigned to one of four stereotype threat conditions and were asked to complete two spatial cognition tasks. Three of the conditions described the task as traditionally displaying gender differences favoring males, due to differences in gender socialization of young boys and girls. Of those three, one empowered all participants through their identity as a women’s college student, and another empowered non-cisgender participants through their non-female identity. Participants also completed measures of implicit and explicit gender identity. Stereotype threat was predicted to decrease performance of cisgender and noncisgender participants in the classic threat condition, but not in the women’s college empowerment condition. Performance was expected to vary as an function of gender identity in non-cisgender empowerment condition. Implicit and explicit gender identification were also predicted to correlate. No significant effect of condition was found. The relation between implicit gender identification and different measures of explicit gender varied for cisgender and non-cisgender participants. Discussion includes consideration of framing factors that may have influenced results for the two groups.