hey I just changed my profile to say I am a horny WOMAN who wants it right now and I'm getting TONS of responses! I guess the theory is true!!

I think racists and sexists subconsciously know this. Notice how they are constantly reminding people verbally of their status. They don't have to say anything negative, just addressing people using "boy," etc.

If test-organizers like gender, race, age, and other statistical facts, why don't they put those questions at the end?

Instead of answering the questions up front, save them for the moment after "pencils down".

I didn't mean to say that "boy" isn't negative, just that they don't have to say, "boy, you are stupid" since the 2nd part is implicit and subconsciously triggered in the victim. Hope that was clear...

When I was in high school I was a student assistant for chemistry classes. A number of very bright women I knew just couldn't deal with chemistiry, or any of the sciences, or math. Somewhere it occurred to me that these women were only doing poorly because they were told, by family, friends, etc that women can't do science. I tried my best to convince some of them otherwise, because I knew they could do it.

Of course 2 of the chemistry teachers were female, as was the best math teacher, the school's only PhD.

It's strange and interesting to me that the men were much less affected by these cues. This suggests to me that women are underperforming their cognitive ability on these tests, evidently because of social gender stereotypes (though there could be something else going on as well), and when you try to reverse the effect, women perform closer to their potential. Men, on the other hand, perform closer to their ability, either because they are competitive, are less fucked up by society, or for some other reason.

This sort of result is why I think that psych tests that show systematic cognitive differences between men and women are often suspect, at least as they are used to try and show biological differences. If really minor social cues like these can cause big swings on a cognitive test, then pretty much any test that doesn't explicitly control for those things is likely to have a significant bias, and always in the direction of the social stereotype. So you'd get results that confirm stereotypes, like that women are worse at math than men. At the very least, the gap would be larger in these tests than biology itself could explain.

When my daughter was in 1st grade, she excelled in every subject, including math. You can imagine my shock when I met her teacher for the first time, and she said, "Your daughter is really good at math - and that's *so* unusual for a girl!" She went on to elaborate on how much easier boys found math, and wasn't that a shame.

Over the next few weeks, I watched as my daughters math scores got progressively worse. Then I remembered the teacher's comments. I decided to schedule regular times with my daughter specifically to reinforce the importance (and fun!) of math and science. Go figure - her test scores shot up again.

As much as I was appalled at the teacher for making that comment, she probably did us a favor in revealing a situation where we needed to mitigate an unhealthy influence.

This isn't specific to a math test, but my first college physics class at the MOntana School of Mines the physics professor announced in class, that if you were a women in his class there be no way we would pass that class. Appalling isn't it, Dr Lowery, I will never forget his name or his face. There were very few women in his class but we marched over to the deans office and complained about that, and they did absolutely NOTHING about it, nothing at all. Later on that year Dr. Lowery belittled some of the male students he was teaching and was let go at the end of the sememster. I am sorry to read, NOTHING HAS CHANGED SINCE THEN, and it pisses me off.

I blew the curve in my high school geometry and pre-calc classes.

I also, along with two guys, blew the curve in my college calculus-for-lit-majors class. Granted, it was definitely a "Calculus for Dummies" course, but I was pretty astonished to discover that people were getting Ds. I thought it was laughably easy.

Of course to counterbalance that, I had a guy I work with say to me a few weeks ago that he couldn't believe Neal Stephenson was my favorite author, because he didn't think women really "got" his writing, especially all the mathematics. I confessed that yes I had skipped over the one page in "Cryptonomicon" that is nothing but formulas, but that I also skipped over all the Latin passages in "The Name of the Rose" because I only have three years of Latin and not the half a lifetime of scholarship that would be required to understand them.

The data says that people who self-classify themselves do worse on tests even when those tests are not scored manually. This does not imply that the people are influenced by some sort of cue - it could just as easily (and more likely if you ask me) be that the type of people that would fill in that checkbox, as a group do more poorly than those that don't fill in the checkbox. This type of bias in self-selected groups is a common problem.

To establish that a cue is involved - you have to do what one reader suggested - perform the experiment with different sets of groups and ask one set to check the box off before and one set after the exam and see if you get the same effect.

Your friendly neighbourhood scientist

I keep hearing about how girls score better than boys in reading and writing tests than boys (and how this is because boys have to read books written by women now), but has any kind of study similat to that mentioned here been done? I wonder if boys are also doing worse because that is what is expected of them. Especially if they are analyzing a woman's writing while being told that they shouldn't be particularly interested in this (with the possible subtext that, if they do like the writings of a woman, they are likely gay).

Many people seem to do what they are expected to, succeed or fail, join a gang or the marching band. Especially when they are constantly reminded of these expectations.