Toni Schmader

University of British Columbia | UBC ·  Department of Psychology

Gender differences in systemizing and empathizing are sometimes attributed to inherent biological factors. We tested whether such effects are more often interpreted as reflecting men’s and women’s different learning affordances. Study 1 ( N = 624) estimated gender differences in item-level activities from systemizing and empathizing scales (SQ, EQ)...

Girls and women face persistent negative stereotyping within STEM (science, technology, engineering, mathematics). This field intervention was designed to improve boys' perceptions of girls' STEM ability. Boys ( N = 667; mostly White and East Asian) aged 9–15 years in Canadian STEM summer camps (2017–2019) had an intervention or control conversatio...

Can well-documented gender differences in evaluations of prosocial vs. antisocial actions found in childhood and adulthood be traced to sex differences in basic sociomoral preferences in infancy? We provide an answer to this question by meta-analyzing sex differences in preference for prosocial over antisocial agents in a set of 53 samples of Ameri...

Despite global commitments and efforts, a gender‐based division of paid and unpaid work persists. To identify how psychological factors, national policies, and the broader sociocultural context contribute to this inequality, we assessed parental‐leave intentions in young adults (18–30 years old) planning to have children (N = 13,942; 8,880 identifi...

Despite the growing importance of care economy careers (e.g., healthcare and education), men remain underrepresented in these fields. Past research suggests that, while economically developed nations tend to support equal rights for men and women, their labor markets tend to be highly gender-segregated (Charles 1992; 2003). By examining this parado...

Communion, a focus on caring for and connecting with others, is a fundamental value associated with well-being among both women and men. Yet, men tend to identify with communion significantly less than women do. Implicit stereotypes that automatically associate communion with women more than with men may limit the degree to which men identify with...

Can a politician cue national identity and fit? Given that Trump’s rhetoric often signaled the devaluation of certain groups, we examined this across three pre-registered studies . In Study1 (2017), targets of Trump’s rhetoric reported less social fit, greater social identity threat, and expected increased discrimination . In Study2 (2017), margina...

We review a program of work articulating the concept of inclusion – and approaches for achieving it – for women working in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Maths (STEM) organisations. A multi-level framework is described to characterise inclusion in STEM workplaces. This framework is then used to conceptualise a series of empirical studies exp...

Implicit math = male stereotypes have been found in early childhood and are linked to girls’ disproportionate disengagement from math-related activities and later careers. Yet, little is known about how malleable children’s automatic stereotypes are, especially in response to brief interventions. In a sample of 336 six- to eleven-year-olds, we expe...

There is a critical disconnect between scientific knowledge about the nature of bias and how this knowledge gets translated into organizational debiasing efforts. Conceptual confusion around what implicit bias is contributes to misunderstanding. Bridging these gaps is the key to understanding when and why antibias interventions will succeed or fail...

Despite the global importance of science, engineering, and math-related fields, women are consistently underrepresented in these areas. One source of this disparity is likely the prevalence of gender stereotypes that constrain girls’ and women’s math performance and interest. The current research explores the developmental roots of these effects by...

Significance Despite widespread initiatives to promote gender diversity and inclusion in science, technology, engineering, and math, subtle barriers to women’s success remain. We present evidence that men with stronger implicit stereotypes report socially including fewer women in the workplace. For women, the lack of social connections from men is...

In male-dominated STEM fields, workplace culture is often cited as a factor for women’s attrition. In the present research, we used longitudinal field data to examine how changes in the perceived normative support for gender-inclusive policies and practices over 6 months relate to changes in women’s and men’s experiences of fit and commitment to th...

People are often reluctant to speak out publicly as allies to marginalized groups. We conducted three preregistered studies examining whether pluralistic ignorance (Miller & McFarland, 1991; Prentice, 2007; Prentice & Miller, 1993) inhibits allyship. We first hypothesized that, if men rarely enact allyship toward women (e.g., in science, technology...

Do well-documented gender differences in evaluations of prosocial vs. antisocial actions have roots in sex differences in basic sociomoral preferences in infants? We provide an answer to this question by meta-analyzing sex differences in infants’ preference for prosocial over antisocial agents in a set of 53 samples of infants and toddlers aged bet...

Objective: To examine the psychological mediators of exercise adherence among older adults in a group-based physical activity randomized controlled trial. Method: Older adults (≥65 years) were randomized to one of three conditions as part of the "GrOup-based physical Activity for oLder adults" (GOAL) randomized controlled trial. These included s...

Contemporary women in Western cultures are often trying to juggle careers alongside personal and societal expectations for childrearing in an effort to “have it all.” We examine the effects of this balancing act on heterosexual women’s mate selection motivations. Across three Canadian samples (n = 360), we tested concurrent hypotheses about the des...

Science and engineering research excellence can be maximized if the selection of researchers is made from 100% of the pool of human talent. This requires policies and approaches that encourage broad sections of society, including women and other underrepresented groups, to participate in research. Institutional policies, interpersonal interactions,...

Background: To examine the extent to which group-based exercise programs, informed by self-categorisation theory, result in improvements in psychological flourishing and reductions in age- and gender-related stigma consciousness among older adults. Methods: In the study, older adults (N = 485, ≥ 65 years) were randomised to similar age same gend...

As modern societies become increasingly diverse, organizations have a vested interest in learning how to foster inclusive workplace cultures. The value of inclusion is particularly pronounced in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) where innovation is enhanced when organizations can maximize the intellectual contributions of diverse te...

Whether gender bias contributes to women’s under-representation in scientific fields is still controversial. Past research is limited by relying on explicit questionnaire ratings in mock-hiring scenarios, thereby ignoring the potential role of implicit gender bias in the real world. We examine the interactive effect of explicit and implicit gender...

Not all instances of gender inequality are equally concerning. An emphasis on women's underrepresentation in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math roles (STEM) has not been matched by a similar concern about men's underrepresentation in Healthcare, Early Education, and Domestic roles (HEED). The current research investigates whether and why pe...

Both giving and receiving money have emotional benefits, but when gifts of value are made in the context of socioeconomic differences, there might also be emotional costs. Four studies (and an internal meta-analysis) tested the idea that receiving a generous gift from someone higher in perceived socioeconomic status (SES) signals social identity th...

Diversity and inclusion are a key goal in 21st century society, but people continue to self‐segregate in occupations, communities, and everyday interactions. Are people's choices to separate by groups into these different spaces truly “free?” In this paper, we review and extend a new framework for understanding how social identities contextually an...

Do young women’s expectations about potential romantic partners’ likelihood of adopting caregiving roles in the future contribute to whether they imagine themselves in nontraditional future roles? Meta-analyzed effect sizes of five experiments (total N = 645) supported this complementarity hypothesis. Women who were primed with family-focused (vs....

In the present research, we applied a goal-congruity perspective – the proposition that men and women seek out roles that afford their internalized values (Diekman et al., 2017) – to better understand the degree to which careers in healthcare, early education, and domestic roles (HEED; Croft et al., 2015) are devalued in society. Our first goal was...

Gender norms can lead men to shy away from traditionally female roles and occupations in communal HEED domains (Healthcare, Early Education, Domestic sphere) that do not fit within the social construct of masculinity. But to what extent do men underestimate the degree to which other men are accepting of men in these domains? Building on research re...

Social identity threat has been proposed as a key contributor to the underrepresentation of women in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM), but little research has sought to pinpoint naturally occurring contextual predictors of identity threat for women already training or working in STEM. The focus of the present research was to examin...

Gender stereotypes that associate science and technology to men more than women create subtle barriers to women's advancement in these fields. But how do stereotypic associations, when internalized by women, relate to their own sense of fit and organizational commitment? Our research is the first to demonstrate that, among working engineers, women'...

Communion and agency are often described as core human values. In adults, these values predict gendered role preferences. Yet little work has examined the extent to which young boys and girls explicitly endorse communal and agentic values and whether early gender differences in values predict boys’ and girls’ different role expectations. In a sampl...

The present research examined whether women’s daily experience of social identity threat in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) settings is triggered by a lack of acceptance during workplace conversations with male colleagues that then predicts daily experiences of burnout. To test these hypotheses, participants from two samples (N =...

Background: Despite the health benefits of regular physical activity, across the globe older adults represent the least active section of society. Purpose: The GrOup-based physical Activity for oLder adults (GOAL) trial was a three-arm parallel randomized controlled trial (RCT) that was designed to test the efficacy of two group-based exercise p...

Gender stereotypes that associate science and technology to men more than women create subtle barriers to women’s advancement in these fields. But how do stereotypic associations, when internalized by women, relate to their own sense of fit and organizational commitment? Our research is the first to demonstrate that, among working engineers, women’...

Communion and agency are often described as core human values. In adults, these values predict gendered role preferences. Yet little work has examined the extent to which young boys and girls explicitly endorse communal and agentic values and whether early gender differences in values predict boys’ and girls’ different role expectations. In a sampl...

Changes in social cognitions targeted within a group-based mentoring program for adolescent girls were examined as predictors of changes in physical activity (PA) and dietary behavior (in two separate models) over the course of the 7-week program. Data were collected from 310 participants who participated in the program. Multilevel path models were...

Wood and Eagly (2015) make a valuable contribution to the understanding of gender psychology by reviewing how gender identity has been conceptualized in different literatures. But beyond comparing and contrasting these two traditions in North American and Western European samples, we advocate for more clarity in how gender identity is defined and t...

Efforts to promote women in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) require a clearer understanding of the experience of social identity threat outside academic contexts. Although social identity threat has been widely studied among students, very little research has examined how the phenomenon occurs naturalistically among working profes...

Physical activity has health benefits across the lifespan, yet only 13 % of Canadian older adults are sufficiently active. Results from a number of observational studies indicate that adults display positive preferences for exercising with others of a similar age and same gender, and that intra-group age- and gender-similarity are associated with e...

Research has documented that subtle reminders of negative stereotypes can reduce performance for those who are targeted by them. This phenomenon has been labeled stereotype threat and was originally proposed as a novel explanation for racial and gender gaps in certain types of intellectual performance. Two decades of research on stereotype threat h...

Previous research has found that subtle reminders of negative stereotypes about one's group can lead individuals to underperform on stereotype-relevant tests (e.g., women in math, ethnic minorities on intelligence tests). This so called stereotype threat effect can contribute to systematic group differences in performance that can obscure the true...

Disadvantaged ethnic groups are often portrayed stereotypically in film, but little is known about how such portrayals affect members of those groups. Two experiments examined the affective and attitudinal reactions of Mexican and European Americans to stereotypic film clips of Latinos. Results of Study 1 revealed that stereotypic films cue negativ...

Social psychological research has sought to understand and mitigate the psychological barriers that block women's interest, performance, and advancement in male-dominated, agentic roles (e.g., science, technology, engineering, and math). Research has not, however, correspondingly examined men's underrepresentation in communal roles, traditionally o...

A central question of human psychology is whether and when people change for the better. Although it has long been assumed that emotion plays a central role self-regulation, the role of specific emotions in motivating a desire for self-change has been largely ignored. We report two studies examining people’s lived experiences of self-conscious emot...

A central question of human psychology is whether and when people change for the better. Although it has long been assumed that emotion plays a central role in self-regulation, the role of specific emotions in motivating a desire for self-change has been largely ignored. We report 2 studies examining people's lived experiences of self-conscious emo...

This study assessed whether individual differences in self-oriented neural processing were associated with performance perceptions of minority students under stereotype threat. Resting electroencephalographic activity recorded in white and minority participants was used to predict later estimates of task errors and self-doubt on a presumed measure...

In any diverse society, public policy can help to provide equal access to opportunities for achieving one’s potential in school and work. However, even as policies in the United States have sought to eradicate institutionalized discrimination on the basis of race or sex, women and minorities continue to underperform academically and are systematica...

Gender inequality at home continues to constrain gender equality at work. How do the gender disparities in domestic labor that children observe between their parents predict those children's visions for their future roles? The present research examined how parents' behaviors and implicit associations concerning domestic roles, over and above their...

The objective of the studies presented in this paper was to examine whether the need to belong can be used to enhance exercise cognitions and behavior. Two studies examined the effectiveness of framing exercise as a means of boosting social skills (versus health benefits) for self-regulatory efficacy, exercise intentions, and (in Study 2) exercise...

We examined the hypothesis that stereotype threat disrupts reflexive cuing of the default self-concept and instead evokes a more reflective process of self-definition. Across two studies, a reaction time measure of math schematicity assessed prior to a math test was predicted by baseline math schematicity among men (Study 1) and women in a nonthrea...

Stereotype threat can vary in source, with targets being threatened at the individual and/or group level. This study examines specifically the role of self-reputational threat in women's underperformance in mathematics. A pilot study shows that women report concerns about experiencing self-reputational threat that are distinct from group threat in...

In an effort to identify effective strategies for reducing prejudice, this research tested whether stigmatized individuals can evoke a common identity to deflect discrimination. In an initial survey, gay/lesbian/bisexual participants reported a preference for evoking common identity in intergroup interactions. In two experiments, straight male perc...

Background For the overweight, is the thought of exercising in close proximity to physically fit, normal-weight individuals a deterrent or an attractor? Efforts to address this question stand to inform future intervention-based research. Purpose The purpose of the study was to examine whether overweight individuals possess a preference for exercisi...

How can we learn from our mistakes if we're unaware they exist? The present research tested the hypothesis that minority students receive less critical feedback on their written work from evaluators who are primarily externally motivated to inhibit their racial biases. Participants highlighted instances of good/bad writing in essays purportedly wri...

The present study examined how individual differences in motivation to respond without prejudice predict self-reported negative affect and physiological responses to the prejudicial acts of others. One hundred and one White participants were paired with a Black “partner” and together they watched two White men on film having either a pro- or antidi...

The theory of stereotype threat has captivated those who have long struggled to understand why some groups of people seem to systematically underperform in certain domains. But although early research on the theory provided dramatic examples that even very subtle reminders of being negatively stereotyped could impair performance, it has been only r...

In academic and organizational domains, performance measures are often used to assess achievement or aptitude. When certain groups of people systematically underperform on such measures, a common interpretation is that the groups differ in inherent ability. However, social psychological research over the past 15 years has documented a phenomenon ca...

Priming negative stereotypes of African Americans can bias perceptions toward novel Black targets, but less is known about how these perceptions ultimately arise. Examining how neural regions involved in arousal, inhibition and control covary when negative stereotypes are activated can provide insight into whether individuals attempt to downregulat...

Two experiments tested the prediction that stigmatized individuals can avoid backlash when they confront others about bias if they first ask questions designed to activate self-affirmation processes. Experiment 1 showed that compared to a no-strategy control condition, highly prejudiced perceivers tended to express less desire to meet an Arab-Ameri...

Two experiments tested the hypothesis that the threat of a negative stereotype increases the frequency of mind-wandering (i.e., task-unrelated thought), thereby leading to performance impairments. Study 1 demonstrated that participants anticipating a stereotype-laden test mind-wandered more during the Sustained Attention to Response Task. Study 2 a...

Research on the role of emotion in social identity, group processes, and intergroup conflict is burgeoning. This paper examines recent research on group-based shame and guilt and describes important themes in this research. Guilt and shame are distinguished by different appraisals and motivations in intergroup contexts. Group-based shame is associa...

Past research has examined women’s subjective satisfaction in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM), but the actual events that correlate with disengagement have not been identified. In this study, workplace conversations of 45 female and male STEM faculty were sampled using the Electronically Activated Recorder, a naturalistic observat...

In a series of experiments, a retraining paradigm was used to test the effects of attitudes and stereotypes on individuals' motivation and cognitive capacity in stereotype-threatening contexts. Women trained to have a more positive math attitude exhibited increased math motivation (Study 1). This effect was not observed for men but was magnified am...

Four studies investigated whether political allegiance and salience of outgroup membership contribute to the phenomenon of acceptance of false, stigmatizing information (smears) about political candidates. Studies 1-3 were conducted in the month prior to the 2008 U.S. Presidential election and together demonstrated that pre-standing opposition to J...

More than a decade of research has demonstrated that individuals underperform in situations that remind them that they are stereotyped to do poorly. This paper explores the psychological processes that underlie these stereotype threat effects. Specifically, reminders of negative stereotypes cue uncertainty and a search for evidence that one might b...

This research examined the benefits of interpreting physiological arousal as a challenge response on practice and actual Graduate Record Examination (GRE) scores. Participants who were preparing to take the GRE reported to the laboratory for a practice GRE study. Participants assigned to a reappraisal condition were told arousal improves performanc...

Abstract This research differentiates shame and guilt as distinct emotional reactions that parents in the United States can have for their children's misdeeds. In Study 1, when 93 parents wrote about their child's worst transgression, their ratings of perceived public exposure and threat to their self-image predicted shame, whereas the degree to wh...

Three studies tested the hypothesis that negative metacognitive interpretations of anxious arousal under stereotype threat create cognitive deficits in intellectually threatening environments. Study 1 showed that among minority and White undergraduates, anxiety about an intelligence test predicted lower working memory when participants were primed...

Research shows that stereotype threat reduces performance by diminishing executive resources, but less is known about the psychological processes responsible for these impairments. The authors tested the idea that targets of stereotype threat try to regulate their emotions and that this regulation depletes executive resources, resulting in underper...

Psychological disengagement allows stigmatized individuals to cope with negative outcomes in stereotype-relevant domains, but its role in online performance monitoring and adjustment is unknown. This study examined how two forms of disengagement (devaluing and discounting) predict performance monitoring at an early (motivational) and later (interpr...

In his target article, Henry (this issue) reminds us of a criticism that is often lodged against social psycho-logical research. The claim that too much research is derived from a college student sample is unassailable, especially in light of the summary data that Henry provides from the field's top basic and applied jour-nals. It also seems undeni...

Research showing that activation of negative stereotypes can impair the performance of stigmatized individuals on a wide variety of tasks has proliferated. However, a complete understanding of the processes underlying these stereotype threat effects on behavior is still lacking. The authors examine stereotype threat in the context of research on st...

Killing appears to perpetuate itself even in the absence of retaliation. This phenomenon may occur in part as a means to justify prior killing and so ease the threat of prior killing. In addition, this effect should arise particularly when a killer perceives similarity to the victims because similarity should exacerbate threat from killing. To exam...

The present research examined emotions as predictors of opposition to policies and actions of one's country that are perceived to be illegitimate. Two studies investigated the political implications of American (Study 1) and British (Study 2) citizens' anger, guilt, and shame responses to perceived harm caused by their countries' occupation of Iraq...

Letters of recommendation are central to the hiring process. However, gender stereotypes could bias how recommenders describe female compared to male applicants. In the current study, text analysis software was used to examine 886 letters of recommendation written on behalf of 235 male and 42 female applicants for either a chemistry or biochemistry...