Cat Hicks
One reason diversity initiatives are sabotaged?
If you think it is valid & right that your subgroup represents and defines a category, for instance, men considering themselves the rightful prototypical members of STEM careers, you will be more likely to resist opening up the group to others and more likely to demand that anyone entering the category conforms to YOUR norms.
This effect is reversed when you do not have a baseline belief that your group has the default right to be the prototype
Cat Hicks
Banger quote: "A missing piece of the leaky pipeline metaphor may be that when men see more women entering the pipeline, they create more leaks" 💀
Cat Hicks
Juicy little tidbit, this result holds when controlling for masculinity insecurity! "prototypicality legitimacy" is its own distinct belief system here (likely domain specific imho)
Source: Danbold, F., & Huo, Y. J. (2017). Men's defense of their prototypicality undermines the success of women in STEM initiatives. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 72, 57-66.
I found a copy here: https://huolab.psych.ucla.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/5/2013/03/Danbold-Huo-JESP-2017.pdf
Cat Hicks
This is a lab demonstration of an effect many of us have experienced in the real world, where success provokes threat response:
"successful gender diversity efforts may threaten men's sense of ownership over the STEM identity"
Without addressing and changing these responses, backlash continues.
Cat Hicks
I was curious whether the authors have followed up on this observational work by looking into any interventions that seem effective at changing these kind of belief states. They have. Here's an interesting example that looks at breaking the chain of sexist norm transference between supervisors and subordinates:
Cat Hicks
I'm adding onto this thread because I think I missed emphasizing an important take-away (protip -- read papers over a couple of days)
This isn't *inevitable*: men who didn't hold this strong belief in a masculine default for STEM careers actually embraced examples of the success of women in STEM, and the researchers found those success examples *lowered* rather than increased threat.
Paul Cantrell
Would you be willing to work out this bit just a little more?
“those success examples *lowered* rather than increased threat”
I feel like I’m in that dangerous zone here where I understand only enough to misunderstand.
Paul Cantrell
@grimalkina
Certainly not oversimplified for me; probably barely simplified enough for my dim understanding of the ways of social science!
IIUC, “prototypicality legitimacy” here means roughly some version of “good programmers tend fit some specific prototype (‘male’ in this case)?” (I take it there’s some nuanced distinction between the words “prototypical” and “stereotypical” here?)
And the theory is that some people lean on that kind of belief while others don’t (or at least there’s a continuum)?
Cat Hicks
Now here is the fun part: there are a few things that we might imagine happening. Key to this is understanding we can separate men into two groups: either being HIGH in prototypicality legitimacy, or being LOW in it (I'm sorry, experimentalists apparently find it IMPOSSIBLE to name things simply)
We want to know what happens for both groups. The central research question is, will men with high PL have a stronger threat response to the "majority loss"?
Cat Hicks
But what about men low in PL? We could imagine they have NO response (don't get more threatened at the majority loss), that being low in PL essentially makes you hold steady.
Interestingly though, we don't see them stay neutral. We see them CHANGE when comparing the majority loss condition: they show lower threat. This is similar to how we would expect, for instance, women to react to this scenario!
Fig 3 illustrates. The dotted line isn't straight, it shifts down.
Cat Hicks
Ok, pls excuse if this is oversimplified but in the interests of other readers too:
- key to this is in the second study methods (sec 6.1.3). In the second study, they wanted to do a direct "manipulation" of whether participants (all men working in STEM) are being exposed to a message about how STEM has changed (or not).
They randomly assign ppl to 1/2 conditions: 1) reading about an initiative for women in STEM succeeding at change the % of women in STEM in the future, or
Cat Hicks
2) reading about the same initiative failing to change the % of women
The thinking here is that a direct manipulation helps us to be more precise about *what* is driving the threat response. E.g., not just "thinking about an initiative for women in STEM" but prompting imagining specific future changes. (by the way we call this theoretical precision; you need to match your measure to your theoretical account of what you're observing as well as possible)
Cat Hicks
Then, they developed the outcome measures, which include a measure of *threat* (sec 6.1.4.1.) e.g., “I worry
that by 2050, it won't be clear what my professional field stands for.”, “I am concerned that by 2050, men will no longer represent my field's
professional identity.”, and “I believe there will always be a place for
men like me in my professional field.”
(I find these fun to read because I have also worked on threat measures)
Cat Hicks
@inthehands of course!! I love talking about threat lol let me pull it open again to be clear (I have read HUNDREDS of studies these last three months)
Paul Cantrell
@grimalkina
So if I’m understanding that graph, we have a situation where:
- some people feel more optimistic about their •own• future when they hear about conditions improving for •others• (!!), while other people feel more pessimistic
- and there’s a sharp divergence between those groups
- and that divergence correlates with whether people think their own ability / security in their field is due to innate traits
??
Cat Hicks
@inthehands oh yes thank you I should've defined that. It's a version of innate essentializing (*I* probably would've named it differently). Here's the operationalization:
Cat Hicks
"the extent to which participants felt that innate ability legitimized their group's prototypicality in STEM:
“There is something innate about being a man that makes someone better at working in my professional field.”,
“There is a biological basis for why men do better at my professional field than women.”, and
“Biology has nothing to do with men or women succeeding in my professional field.” [reverse coded]
Cat Hicks
@inthehands And yes, there is a continuum! You can endorse this belief more strongly or not, you can also endorse OTHER beliefs that compete with it/or can be activated instead of it (beliefs are fucking complicated)
Paul Cantrell
@grimalkina @sennoma
I love hearing all the theoretical and methodological care it takes to ask these questions well, and appreciate you bearing with my clumsy attempts to understand it in lay terms (which of course ends up flattening out some of that care)
Cat Hicks
@sennoma @inthehands I really, really enjoy unpacking social science methods and love questions of this sort
lower-value human capital
(Just poking my head around the door to thank Paul for asking and Cat for answering -- in terms I can understand -- this question. Fascinating stuff.)
As you were.
Paul Cantrell
So now I really understand what you meant about this result being notable: it’s not much of a surprise that people who sense of security hinges on identity traits would feel threatened, but it seems really important that when people get away from prototypicality, they actually derive optimism from the possibility of others succeeding. That seems just incredibly important.
Cat Hicks
@inthehands Yes! A good summary!
"Innate trait" explanations of human achievement that are tied to dominant social groups almost *always* make us more brittle in the face of change, challenge, including experiencing positive progress AS a challenge that it is not, is the argument of a lot of us who work on these belief structures
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