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   Dr. Cat Hicks (grimalkina@mastodon.social)'s status on Friday, 27-Sep-2024 01:55:49 JST Dr. Cat Hicks

   Reading papers about interventions to decrease bias in STEM fields is like, so funny because they'll be like: "on the one hand, the evidence is clear that we benefit emotionally, cognitively, behaviorally, and in overall achievement from solving this equity issue. On the other hand, every fiber of our being screams against progress for some reason"

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     Dr. Cat Hicks (grimalkina@mastodon.social)'s status on Friday, 27-Sep-2024 01:55:46 JST Dr. Cat Hicks

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     Less somber sidenote that I dig this ecological framing so much; the group setting as an ecology, the contagion of beliefs, the co-construction of a different meaning of adversity within the specific ecology of the classroom

     Mr. Bill repeated this.
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     Dr. Cat Hicks (grimalkina@mastodon.social)'s status on Friday, 27-Sep-2024 01:55:46 JST Dr. Cat Hicks

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     Further sidenote that it gives me a sad rueful little chuckle that we disparage people who "study gender stuff" and have let the rancid stereotype develop that it's "not a smart field" because developing the theory and evidence for all this is like a brutally hard logic puzzle tangled up with the complexity of social science and smeared all over with the intense pushback you'll always get for trying to think clearly about it; this is an INSANELY HARD SCIENCE.

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     Dr. Cat Hicks (grimalkina@mastodon.social)'s status on Friday, 27-Sep-2024 01:55:47 JST Dr. Cat Hicks

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     The effect of chilly climates is chilling. It murders our ability to benefit from achievement:

     "Unfortunately, several STEM domains, including physics, engineering, and computer science (Cheryan et al., 2017), create “chilly climates” (Hall & Sandler, 1982) that assign women lower status and raise doubts about their ability and belonging (Walton et al., 2015). Diversity may be just as likely to harm as it is to help performance in such situations (see Mannix & Neale, 2005)."

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     Dr. Cat Hicks (grimalkina@mastodon.social)'s status on Friday, 27-Sep-2024 01:55:47 JST Dr. Cat Hicks

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     This is fundamentally the thing we already know, "you are the only one who can clean up this awful mess you made, don't bring the people you've excluded in to clean it up for you", but worked out in scientific evidence

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     Dr. Cat Hicks (grimalkina@mastodon.social)'s status on Friday, 27-Sep-2024 01:55:47 JST Dr. Cat Hicks

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     Within-field disparities are not investigated as much as between-field (e.g., we have documented a million times "women don't major in CS - why?!") but within-field disparities are striking and teach us a lot:

     "[students in physics classrooms] engage in patterns of gendered task division (e.g., women perform secretarial work while men work on problems) that result in inequitable learning opportunities between men and women"

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     Dr. Cat Hicks (grimalkina@mastodon.social)'s status on Friday, 27-Sep-2024 01:55:48 JST Dr. Cat Hicks

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     "despite many studies indicating that gender-diverse environments can improve [...] performance, meta-analyses suggest that, on average, the performance benefits of diversity tend to be insignificant or non-existent (Mannix & Neale, 2005; Post & Byron, 2015).

     This raises a question: when do gender diverse contexts enhance performance...

     In the present research, we propose an answer: the benefits of diversity [to performance] depend on the social context that shapes intergroup interaction"

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     Dr. Cat Hicks (grimalkina@mastodon.social)'s status on Friday, 27-Sep-2024 01:55:48 JST Dr. Cat Hicks

     in reply to

     - Binning, K. R., Doucette, D., Conrique, B. G., & Singh, C. (2024). Unlocking the Benefits of Gender Diversity: How an Ecological-Belonging Intervention Enhances Performance in Science Classrooms. Psychological Science, 35(3), 226-238.

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     Dr. Cat Hicks (grimalkina@mastodon.social)'s status on Friday, 27-Sep-2024 01:55:48 JST Dr. Cat Hicks

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     This is so fundamentally key to understanding the next wave/current frontier of truly changing environments. Realizing that a lot of evidence that has looked contradictory is because key causal elements of the social context were not included. This is exactly one of the points I tried to make in my review paper here, about "missing layers" that reconcile seemingly paradoxical outcomes for interventions: https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/qz43x

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     Dr. Cat Hicks (grimalkina@mastodon.social)'s status on Friday, 27-Sep-2024 01:55:49 JST Dr. Cat Hicks

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     It's more complex than that obvi ("how do we move past/get more people past/ the fact that the early introduction of diversity can heighten subgroup identities and increase bias and feel worse before it feels better"? an important question of responsibility here) but STILL