There was a good piece on NPR last week about stereotype threat, by Shankar Vedantam.

It starts with the STEM problem: fewer women in science, engineering, technology and mathematics. It’s a bad thing. It matters.

It isn’t just that fewer women choose to go into these fields. Even when they go into these fields and are successful, women are more likely than men to quit.

And that isn’t because they get bored and decide to spend all their time thinking about shoes instead.

Audio sampling reveals that something else is going on.

When female scientists talked to other female scientists, they sounded perfectly competent. But when they talked to male colleagues, Mehl and Schmader found that they sounded less

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)