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But Women Feel Threatened When Outnumbered By The Opposite Sex

Washington: Women feel threatened when outnumbered by the opposite sex, such as in math, science and engineering classrooms, while men enjoy being in a roomful of women, a study published on Tuesday showed.
“Walking into a situation in which you sense the possibility of being ostracized or isolated can be quite threatening,” said the study, which looked at the effect of so-called situational cues, such as being outnumbered, on women’s performance in math, science and engineering courses.
The gender ratio in those classes is “approximately three men to every one woman,” said the study, led by Mary Murphy, a psychologist at Stanford University in California.
Published in the October issue of Psychological Science, the study monitored the reactions of a group of advanced students in traditionally male-dominated fields while they watched videos depicting a conference.
In one of the videos, men outnumbered women, while in the other the sexes were equally represented.
The women’s heart rates accelerated and perspiration increased when they watched the video in which their gender was outnumbered.
They also reported “a lower sense of belonging and less desire to participate in the conference,” the study showed. And they paid more attention to their surroundings when they watched the video in which women were in minority.
“This kind of attention allocation (to surroundings) would interfere with performance and might help explain the performance gap between men and women in these fields,” the study said.
Men, meanwhile, showed no significant physiological or attention changes when watching either film.
In fact, they liked being in a setting dominated by women.
“Women probably feel they really could belong in the environment where there are more women, while men might simply be attracted by the unusual number of women in these settings,” said Murphy.
This research underlies the importance of situational cues and Murphy hopes that it will “inspire greater motivation to attend to such cues when creating and modifying environments so that they may foster perceptions of identity safety rather than threat.”
Former Harvard University president Lawrence Summers drew fire two years ago for suggesting “innate” gender differences as a reason for the preponderance of men in leadership roles in math and science. AFP

Source: Times of India, October 4, 2007