Gender-Role Attitudes 912007; Yu & Xie, 2010). Stereotypes also can
be internalized in a way that restricts oppor-
tunities for both women and men. One study
showed that when young adult (ages 20–30)
men and women were asked to identify their
career preferences, men identified mascu-
line careers and women identified feminine
careers (Gadassi & Gati, 2009). In essence,
they relied on gender-role stereotypes. How-
ever, when stereotypes were made less salient
by providing men and women with a list of
career possibilities, men’s career preferences
were slightly less masculine and women’s ca-
reer preferences were much less feminine.Altering Gender-Role Stereotypes
If we make exceptions for cases that do not fit
our stereotypes and treat people in ways that
will confirm our stereotypes, how can stereo-
types ever be altered? Stereotypes are difficult
to change. We tend to notice information that
confirms our stereotype and ignore informa-
tion that disconfirms it, or we create a special
subtype for those disconfirming instances.
People with strong stereotypes tend to have
poorer recall for stereotype-inconsistent in-
formation and tend to misremember incon-
sistent information as consistent with the
stereotype (Rudman, Glick, & Phelan, 2008).
We also make dispositional or trait attribu-
tions for behavior that confirms the stereo-
type but situational attributions for behavior
that disconfirms the stereotype. Let’s take an
example. We expect women to show an inter-
est in children. Therefore, if we see a woman
playing with a baby, we are likely to make the
dispositional attribution that she is nurturant
rather than the situational attribution that
she is bored and looking for a way to distract
herself. Conversely, if we see a man playing
with a baby, we are more likely to decide that
situational forces constrained his behaviorThe IAT has become a useful instru-
ment in the field of gender stereotyping
because people are less likely to express gen-
der stereotypes today. The IAT has been
applied to the stereotype concerning gender
and wealth—specifically, the idea that men
make higher salaries than women in the same
job (Williams, Paluck, & Spencer-Rodgers,
2010). Respondents whose scores on a wealth
IAT showed that they connected being male
to high income also rated males as having
higher incomes than females. Implicit ste-
reotypes about wealth not only could lead
employers to offer women lower salaries than
men but also could lead women employees to
expect and be satisfied with lower wages.
Up to this point, the impact of the self-
fulfilling prophecy on stereotypes has sounded
mostly negative. Can the self-fulfilling proph-
ecy ever help performance? If I believe boys
are quite skilled at reading and give a boy a
lot of books to read, will he develop superior
reading skills? Quite possibly. Shih, Pittinsky,
and Ambady (1999) investigated whether
stereotypes can help as well as hinder perfor-
mance. They studied quantitative skills among
Asian women because these women face con-
tradictory stereotypes: Females are depicted
as having inferior quantitative skills, whereas
Asians are depicted as having superior quan-
titative skills. The investigators found that
Asian women’s performance on a math test
improved when their racial identity was made
salient but deteriorated when their gender
identity was made salient. Thus it appears that
stereotypes can influence performance in both
positive and negative ways.
Stereotypes can also be harmful in that
they restrict our behavior. We feel pressur-
ized to conform to society’s gender-role
stereotypes. It appears that boys—White,
Black, Hispanic, and Chinese—feel greater
pressure than girls (Corby, Hodges, & Perry,M03_HELG0185_04_SE_C03.indd 91 6/21/11 12:22 PM