Competence and confusion: How stereotype threat can make you a bad judge of your competence

Women tend to have competence doubts for masculine-stereotyped domains (e.g., math), whereas men tend to think they can handle both feminine-stereotyped and masculine-stereotyped domains equally well. We suggest that perhaps women's more frequent experience with stereotype threat can partly explain why. Our results showed that when stereotype threat was primed in high school students (n = 244), there was no relationship between their performance on an academic test (the SweSAT) and their assessment of their performance (how well they did), whereas in a non-stereotype threat condition, there was a medium-sized relationship. The effect was similar for both men and women primed with stereotype threat. The results imply that stereotype threat undermines performance assessments.