This talk is rooted in research aimed at identifying unseen pressures on the academic performance of certain groups—groups whose abilities are negatively stereotyped such as women in math and minorities in most academic fields.  Group inequality in educational performance is, for the most part, a product of group inequality in educational opportunity.  But some group differences in performance persist even when opportunity is, by most reckonings, equal.  Why?  This research has pursued a particular answer: Performing in areas where the abilities of one’s group are negatively stereotyped puts one under a persistent pressure, the pressure that any difficulty in the area could cause one to be judged and treated in terms of that group stereotype.  We have called this pressure “stereotype threat” and argue that it can be powerful enough to shape the intellectual performance and academic identities of entire groups of people.

The first part of the talk will document the effects of this “threat” on the academic performance of women in math and minorities more generally, as well as its interfering effects on a broad range of other performances—sports, language usage, emotional sensitivity, memory, etc.—and in a broad set of other groups—Asians, white males, Latinos, the elderly, etc.  Most important, it will show that when this pressure is alleviated, these performances—even those understood to be tenaciously low—improve dramatically.

The second part of the talk will describe new research showing that the very sense of having a group identity—of being black, of being old, of being white—is significantly rooted in the perception that one is under threat because of that identity, and that this perception arises from cues in a setting that, while often incidental, may nonetheless signal contingencies tied to that identity—cues such as that identity being in the minority, that identity being under-represented in prestigious roles in the setting, or friendship, and professional networks being organized around group identity.  The talk will end with principles of remedy, derived from this analysis, principles that have been successfully applied to the group underperformance problem that launched this research, and to the more general problem of how to manage a successfully diverse society.