4 The Psychology of Inequity performance for worse (in the case of negative stereotypes and threat: e.g., Steele & Aronson, 1995 for a recent review, see Spencer, Logel, & Davies, 2016) or, in certain cases, for better (in the case of positive stereotypes and lift: e.g., Walton & Cohen, 2003). In the original studies, stereotype threat effects focused on women and math (Spencer & Steele, 1992) as well as African Americans and academic performance (Steele & Aronson, 1995). In both cases, participants who were reminded of their gender or their race prior to completing a diagnostic task relevant to the stereotypes applied to their group performed worse. Importantly, these effects only occurred when participants believed that the tasks they were engaging in were diagnostic of their abilities (Steele & Aronson, 1995). Subsequent studies have found that stereotype threat effects can occur with class, with low SES students performing worse on tasks that were framed as intelligence rather than problem-solving tests (Croizet & Claire, 1998). Since then, stereotype threat has also been shown to occur with other races/ethnicities (e.g., Latinos: Nadler & Clark, 2011), age (i.e., in a variety of cognitive as well as physical tasks: see Lamont, Swift, & Abrams, 2015, for review), and sexual orientation (i.e., in interactions with preschool children: Bosson, Haymovitz, & Pinel, 2004). On a broader societal level, the literature on stereotype threat has shown that stereotype threat can account for very real inequities in the workplace, including in explaining the relative paucity of women in lead- ership (Hoyt & Murphy, 2016), engineering (Cadaret, Hartung, Subich, & Weigold, 2017), and finance (von Hippel, Sekaquaptewa, & McFarlane, 2015), as well as lower levels of adjustment for older individuals in the workplace (Manzi, Paderi, Benet-Martínez, & Coen, 2019). In other words, the stereotype that women are less likely to be good at leadership, engi- neering, or finance compared to men can lead women in these fields to perform worse because of the anxiety caused by this awareness likewise, the ageist stereotypes against older workers can also make them perform worse in the workplace. Researchers have gone on to argue that despite the limited research on stereotype threat in the workplace, the body of literature as a whole suggests that factors such as underrepresentation, harassment, and even diversity statements can contribute to threats that exacerbate inequality by reifying concerns about stereotypes and stereo- type threat (Walton, Murphy, & Ryan, 2015). Interestingly, studies on the role of stereotype threat on standardized tests have been more controversial. Some researchers have concluded that these effects do not emerge as key factors in predicting group differences in scores (e.g., Cullen, Hardison, & Sackett, 2004). Other work has shown that stereotype threat effects can account for real outcomes: Black and Latino students who self-reported more stereotype threat had lower GPAs even when controlling for demographics and previous performance, especially in contexts when there was little diversity (e.g., Massey & Fischer, 2005, as cited in Walton, Spencer, & Erman, 2013). More direct evidence came
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