Stereotypes are good because they’re true February 3, 2013
Posted by mareserinitatis in feminism, societal commentary.Tags: feminism, sexism, sexist comments, stereotypes, women in science
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A couple weeks ago, I was talking with someone who mentioned an email about stereotypes of women. He apparently thought it was funny, and I made the quip that I hadn’t seen it because obviously no one would be stupid enough to send something like that to me. There was some effort at defending the email, but I said that stereotypes aren’t defensible because they cause you to judge all people who fall into a particular category the same way rather than viewing them as unique individuals who may or may not resemble the stereotype.
In particular, I talked about my experience when I first started going to college. A frequently overheard comment my first year or two of college is that, “Women are only accepted here because of affirmative action.” Dummy me, I started to believe it.
It was a couple years later when I realized it was bunk. I was working on a website for the women’s center, and I was asked to put up statistics that compared female and male admitted students. It turned out that the stats came from my particular class, and one of the things that I was putting up was a comparison between SAT scores of the two groups. I found it interesting that there was only about a 10-point difference between men and women. What really got me was when I found out that my SAT scores were actually higher than the average male SAT scores. I was livid. I’d been told for so long that I had only been admitted because of my uterus that I would’ve never believed it. That meant that my SAT scores were better than more than half the men in my cohort.
Going back to the conversation, I became even more irritated when someone else jumped into the conversation, making the assertion that stereotypes are just fine. Apparently, in this person’s world, the people they misjudge are apparently acceptable casualties because “most of the time,” it’s true.
Sadly, I doubt this person would understand how their judgments impact other people. In fact, I think they’d be especially reluctant to agree with this article about how stereotypes are bad even when they’re good.
I admit to having caught myself assuming stereotypes of people. It’s something that I have to work on constantly. It’s disappointing, however, that there are still people who think stereotypes are a reasonable approach to human interaction.
I also blog at Engineer Blogs, home away from home to some of the best engineering blogs.
Here’s us on stereotype threat: http://nicoleandmaggie.wordpress.com/2011/05/22/stereotype-threat/