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"A 2010 research report by AAUW presents compelling evidence that can help to explain this puzzle. Why So Few? Women in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) presents in-depth yet accessible profiles of eight key research findings that point to environmental and social barriers - including stereotypes, gender bias, and the climate of science and engineering departments in colleges and universities - that continue to block women's progress in STEM. The report also includes up-to-date statistics on girls' and women's achievement and participation in these areas and offers new ideas for what each of us can do to more fully open scientific and engineering fields to girls and women."

"The summit kicked off with a wonderful keynote by Joshua Aronson who is an Associate Professor of Psychology and Education at New York University (NYU). Aronson studies stereotypes, self-esteem, motivation, and attitudes. He showed some remarkable research results that showed that when people are reminded of their race or gender in a testing situation where there is a negative stereotype, they do worse on the test. This is called Stereotype Threat - which he defined as being at risk of confirming, as self-characteristic, a negative stereotype about one's group. The threat causes anxiety, and all kinds of measurable changes - from the brain to heart rate, and also greatly impacts test results. Simply putting a box to mark gender, for example, at the front of a math test significantly changed test scores - for both men and women. Compared to a test where gender was not asked for, if gender was asked for at the beginning of a test, boy's scores went up, girls' scores went down. If gender was asked at the end, boys' scores went down, girls' scores went up."

Against the Cinderella culture, a Catholic high school in Kentucky has a blunt message for young girls.

Founded in 1943, ASCD (formerly the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development) is an educational leadership organization dedicated to advancing best practices and policies for the success of each learner. Our 175,000 members in 119 countries are professional educators from all levels and subject areas--superintendents, supervisors, principals, teachers, professors of education, and school board members.

"If we are serious about closing achievement gaps, we will have to move beyond the simplistic rhetoric of "It's the family," or "It's the schools," or "It's poverty"-or "It's stereotyping," for that matter. " In this article, the author argues that stereotype threat, an invisible factor, negatively impacts the performance of affected students, ranging from African American males to girls in math-oriented domains. It may account for some of the achievement gap. Stereotype threat occurs when others have negative expectations of the student's performance based on some external stereotype. The student then has to overcome the inherent negative threat, thereby facing two potential failures - actually performing poorly and the perception of performing poorly because of the stereotype. Research by the author and a colleague demonstrates that due to this additional stress and pressure, the student does more poorly precisely because he or she tries too hard in a situation in which a more relaxed concentration leads to success, particularly in high-stakes evaluations. Because stereotype threat is partly situational, the author believes that students can be taught to overcome it and that teachers and others can learn to avoid it. (WestEd)

"As so many studies have demonstrated, success in math and the hard sciences, far from being a matter of gender, is almost entirely dependent on culture - a culture that teaches girls math isn't cool and no one will date them if they excel in physics; a culture in which professors rarely encourage their female students to continue on for advanced degrees; a culture in which success in graduate school is a matter of isolation, competition and ridiculously long hours in the lab; a culture in which female scientists are hired less frequently than men, earn less money and are allotted fewer resources. And yet, as I listened to these four young women laugh at the stereotypes and fears that had discouraged so many others, I was heartened that even these few had made it this far, that theirs will be the faces the next generation grows up imagining when they think of a female scientist."

Tiltfactor Laboratory's buffalo is a 20-minute card game for 2-8 players, ages 14 and older. It was created as part of a National Science Foundation-funded project to design and study games to combat implicit bias and stereotype threat against girls and women in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) fields.

Intelligence, Motivation, and Intellectual Curiosity are the three pillars of intelligence, and yet, it is very fragile. "Most of my work seeks to understand and remediate race and gender gaps in educational achievement and standardized test performance. Often, the low performance of blacks in particular, but other minorities as well, gets casually chalked up to genetic or cultural differences that supposedly block acquisition of skills or values necessary for academic achievement. In sharp contrast, my students, colleagues, and I have uncovered some exciting and encouraging answers to these old questions by looking at the psychology of stigma - the way human beings respond to negative stereotypes about their racial or gender group. What we have found suggests that being targeted by well-known cultural stereotypes ("blacks are unintelligent", "girls can't do math", and so on) can be very threatening, a predicament my mentor and I called "Stereotype Threat." Stereotype threat engenders a number of interesting psychological and physiological responses, many of which interfere with intellectual performance and academic motivation. I have conducted numerous studies showing how stereotype threat depresses the standardized test performance of black, Latino, and female college students. These same studies showed how changing the testing situation (even subtly) to reduce stereotype threat, can dramatically improve standardized test scores. This work offers a far more optimistic view of race and gender gaps than the older theories that focused on poverty, culture, or genetic factors. We have found that we can do a lot to boost both achievement and the enjoyment of school by understanding and attending to these psychological processes, thereby unseating the power of stereotypes and prejudice to foil the academic aspirations of the young people who, just by virtue of being born black, brown, or female, are subjected to suspicions of inferiority.   A particular focus of m

Science Correspondent Cara Santa Maria summarizes the findings of AAUW's 2010 report, Why So Few?, which explores causes of the gender gap in STEM fields. Cites over 300 experiments illustrate the validity of this research. At puberty the gender gap expands dramatically. Interventions suggested: 1) More female representation in the curriculum 2) Expose the biases.