Stereotypes and Self-Perception

To be honest, I don't really even feel qualified to talk to about my experiences with stereotype threat because I have never exactly felt "victimized" by it. I have been blessed with education, safety, opportunity, and people who wanted me to succeed. Nonetheless, it's good to check your self-perception every now and then to see if it makes sense.

This is a pretty silly example, but it illustrates how deeply self-perception can be altered when everyone around you holds a common belief about you. There's one stereotype about women that it has taken me a few years to realize is not true: women are supposed to want to have children. I don't. But for some reason this is expected of women more so than of men. Granted, this expectation may have been more pronounced in the religious sub-culture that I've been a part of for most of my life. And this may not necessarily be a "threat" for everyone, but it became one for me.

For most of college, I thought that there was something wrong with me when I didn't react with excitement in the presence of babies or children the way my female friends did. I thought that this was something to overcome, as though I had a part missing. It may still be that some people see it this way. If I mention in conversation that I don't ever want to have kids, most people react with a disappointed or confused "Why not??" For years, I thought I was flawed because of this. And had I not come to accept this about myself, I might have tried to "fix" it by assimilating with my college friends who married young and had children by age 25. At one point I believed that's what I was supposed to do. So I'm glad my self-perception changed; doing that would not have come from a place of genuine desire.

In my case, I believed that I was supposed to carry out a certain role. The reality is, it doesn't really matter whether the stereotype of a certain group is positive or negative. Both are destructive. Believing that you are supposed to fail because of your race/gender/trait can be just a harmful to a person's self-perception as believing that you are supposed to succeed because of that trait. If people constantly expect failure from you, they see only the times that you fail, not those that you succeed. If they constantly expect success from you, you feel a need to keep up an image that is difficult to meet, and wonder why you are not perfect. Either way, both can end up leading to a feeling of inadequacy.

And if it's a "neutral" stereotype that is being applied to you, such as "women always want to have children", you can end up falsely believing that being "different" means there is something wrong with you.

As far as making a more welcoming environment, one of the best things a person can do is to let someone have the preferences they have. Or in my case, things they prefer to avoid. If someone expresses a sentiment that you don't understand, try to understand it better, or accept that you don't understand it, and be okay with that. The alternative of asking someone in a whiny, concerned voice, "Why not??" is incredibly isolating. We may all have expectations for people that are deeply ingrained, automatic beliefs. But the way to overcome that is to avoid expressing those expectations to others.

Regardless of whether or not there are stereotypes that you are putting on a person, it's good to be aware that people have different ways of thinking about things from you. Accepting different styles of thinking and learning as valid allows coworkers to solve a common problem from multiple angles. Shutting out different angles actually can make the problem harder to solve and cause interpersonal conflict.

Even if you are unable to personally relate to a person's perspective, you can accept the mystery of it. Most of the time, even my own brain is pretty mysterious to me. When I remember that, it makes me want to show a lot more grace to other people. You don't always have to understand everyone or be perfectly understood. But you can accept the mysterious and unique differences. Being aware of my own deficiency in understanding of people and the world is actually quite humbling. That's the attitude that I hope to have (and ever improve upon) when interacting with others in both the workplace and personally.