Chapter 6
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Solo Status: How Lack of Diversity Affects Members of Underrepresented Groups Denise Sekaquaptewa Department of Psychology, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan 48109-1043, United States *E-mail:
[email protected].
In this chapter I describe social science research on solo status, defined as the experience of being the only member of one’s social category (e.g., race or gender) present in an otherwise homogenous group. Race solo status may be a frequent experience for racial/ethnic minority students at predominantly White institutions, and gender solo status may be frequently experienced by women in male-dominated science, technology, engineering, and mathematics fields. Three laboratory experiments, using experimental methodology, demonstrate the negative effect of race and gender solo status on the public performance of members of socially disadvantaged minority groups compared to that of socially privileged majority groups. This research suggests that when settings such as academic institutions, work domains, and fields of study lack diversity, the effects of solo status and stereotyping may reflect a negative cycle, in which women and racial/ethnic minorities experience solo status which diminishes their outcomes, and these diminished outcomes in turn lead women and racial minorities to not enter or leave the setting, thus perpetuating the lack of diversity.
Introduction In educational and work settings that lack gender and racial diversity, individuals from minority groups can often find themselves to be the sole representative of their group in the setting. For example, female students in © 2018 American Chemical Society
male-dominated fields such as science and engineering may find themselves to be the only woman in the lab or upper level seminar. On predominantly White campuses, students from underrepresented racial/ethnic minority groups often find themselves to be the only student of color in the class, with significant influences on anxiety and other mental states (1–3). These outcomes occur for individuals whose social group is underrepresented in their work setting as well (4–8). In this chapter I describe social science research on the experiences of people who are learning or working in domains in which their members of the social group are not well represented. Research in social psychology and related fields demonstrates the impact of this isolating experience on student outcomes including academic performance.
Solo Status Solo status is defined by psychologists as the experience of being the only member of one’s social category present in an otherwise homogenous group (9-10). This experience can be based on gender, as when one is the only member of their gender present in a group; this is termed gender solo status. Racial/ethnic minority group members can experience race solo status in situations in which they are the only members of their race represented in the group. Solo status can occur in regards to other social identities as well, such as age, nationality, religion, and disability status. Given the prevalence of gender and race stereotypes regarding intellectual ability, particularly in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields, in conjunction with our tendency to quickly and automatically categorize others in terms of gender and race (11–13), I have focused on gender and race solo status in the present studies of how these experiences may affect academic outcomes. Social science researchers have studied the experience of being in the numerical minority in various contexts, including work and school settings (4, 5, 14–16). This work has identified distinct terms to describe different types of numerical minority situations. Minority status refers to a situation in which members of one’s group are simply fewer in number than that of a majority group (4). The term tokenism also refers to a minority situation, but with the implication that the minority person or persons were selected for inclusion in the group solely based on their social category membership (e.g., “she’s here because they needed a woman”) (17). Solo status describes the situation of individuals who simply find themselves to be the only members of their social category present, as when a woman enrolls in a physics course and on the first day finds that there are no other women in the class. Therefore, solo status differs from minority status in that it refers to the situation of being the sole member, not one of few members, of one’s group present; and it differs from tokenism, as there is not the connotation that one was brought into the group due to one’s social category. Solo status, minority status, and tokenism are similar and interrelated experiences, and individuals from minority groups likely experience all of these at different points. The research 142
described in this chapter focuses specifically on the situation of solo status, but much of the findings may translate to minority status and token situations as well. Solo status is likely to be a common experience for women in STEM, and underrepresented racial/ethnic minority (URM) students at predominantly White campuses, because they are likely to be in the numerical minority in these settings. In 2013, only 20.7% of undergraduates at 4-year US universities were URM (African American, Hispanic, and Native American), and women earned a lower percentage than men of STEM bachelor’s degrees in the physical sciences (39%), engineering (19.3%), and computer science (17.9%), despite women composing more than half of the student population (18). In terms of faculty, only about one-quarter (24.2%) of STEM PhDs employed as full professors are women (18). Even when individuals are not the only woman or racial/ethnic minority in their department, they may still experience solo status in smaller subgroup settings. For example, a female chemistry professor may have some female colleagues in her department, but may find herself to be the solo woman when serving on departmental and university committees (and indeed, research shows that women and URM faculty are often asked to serve on a large number of committees to increase diversity in the committee membership; (19)). Therefore, solo status may be a familiar experience even for those who are not the “only” in the larger context of their work or educational environment. Given the low numbers of women and URM in STEM, it is important to understand how solo status can affect outcomes for women and racial/ethnic minorities. Social science research has focused on this topic, using both field and laboratory experimental approaches.
Field and Laboratory Research on Solo Status Field research, using interviews, surveys, and observations of individuals in their real-world work and educational settings, has revealed several consistent themes reported by individuals who experience solo status in their workplace. For example, early research on solo status conducted by Rosabeth Moss Kanter (4) examined women working in corporations that were heavily male-dominated, using interview and survey approaches. This work uncovered several consistent themes in the experiences of these solo women. One emergent theme is heightened visibility, revealed in different ways for both majority group and solo individuals in a given social context. Majority group individuals pay more attention to solos; solo individuals “stand out” and draw attention from others due to their distinctiveness in the setting. Kanter (4) found that co-workers in male-dominated corporations tended to have good memory of their few female co-workers, indicating that the perceptual salience of solo women led others to pay attention to and remember what they say and do. This suggests that mistakes and instances of poor performance are noticed and remembered more for solo than non-solo majority people. Solo individuals appear to sense that they draw attention, leading them to experience perceived scrutiny, as they feel that their distinctiveness leads them to be targeted for harsher evaluation than others. One 143
study surveyed U.S. faculty members, and found that racial/ethnic minority faculty members were more likely to endorse questionnaire items reflecting perceived scrutiny, such as “The activities of minority faculty are monitored more closely than are those of White faculty” and “At work, I feel like I am in glass house”. Of interest, this endorsement was particularly evident among URM faculty in departments with fewer faculty of color (5). A second consistent theme is contrast, referring to the solo person being seen as very different from the other people in the context. Perceivers seeing a single woman in a group of men tend to judge her characteristics to be very female, and very different from those of men, more so than when perceivers judge a woman who is in a more gender-balanced group (20). This process reflects an exaggeration of group differences between men and women or racial majority and minority people, when there is great imbalance in representation of women and men, and Whites and people of color. Perhaps as a result of this stark contrast between solo individuals and majority group members, solo individuals tend to experience role encapsulation, in terms of their distinctive social identity. That is, solos report being expected to fulfill roles stereotypically associated with their race or gender. For example, a woman who is the only woman on a committee may be subtly expected to takes notes or straighten up the room after their meetings (4). My previous work on students working together in engineering group project teams showed that students tended to adopt stereotypic roles of men as engineering experts and women as their supporters; racial/ethnic stereotypic roles were evident as well, as for example a solo Asian American student was presumed to be a math expert (21). Being expected to fulfill stereotypic roles is a subtle form of stereotyping. Indeed, much of the stereotyping and bias evinced in current society is subtle, indirect, and often unintended to be harmful (22–25). Yet each instance of this subtle bias can be noticed by the solo individual, who then may come to see their solo status situation negatively. If solo status is a negative psychological experience, with individuals feeling heightened visibility, being starkly contrasted from others, and being targeted by subtle stereotyping, can this influence their performance in this situation? This possibility seems likely, to the extent that dealing with stereotyping and perceived scrutiny uses up cognitive resources, routing them away the task at hand, or from one’s scholarly work more generally (26). If this were the case, it would be important for employers and educators to know, as such evidence could influence diversity-relevant policies and practices within institutions. Of course, such evidence would be particularly compelling if it established a cause and effect relationship between solo status and one’s performance outcomes, by recruiting samples of individuals and randomly assigning them to experience solo status or not. Therefore, social scientists have used experimental methodology to address this question, often in the university context involving samples of college students. The studies I have conducted (described in the remainder of this chapter) involved bringing in samples of college students and randomly assigning them to experience solo status (being the only person of their gender or race in the group) or non-solo status (being in groups with others of their same gender or race) in a laboratory setting. 144
Experimental Methodology In the following solo status experiments, our goal was to assign college students to experience solo and non-solo status in a small testing group, while holding constant the treatment that they received from others in the group. We accomplished this in our lab, which consisted of a suite of interconnected private cubicles, each equipped with a video monitor, headset and microphone, and a camera directed at the participant seated in the cubicle. Participants were told that the study involved communicating with others in a group who are in different remote locations, using the audiovisual (AV) system. Using the AV system, the participant is told that she will be able to see and hear the others in her group, and when she speaks, others will be able to see and hear her. The experimental task involves each group member studying a set of academic information, and later answering questions aloud about it posed by the experimenter (in oral examination fashion), while the rest of the group members watch on their video monitors. While the set-up appears to be one in which several participants located in separate cubicles can interact with one another using the AV system, in actuality there was only one real participant, who was shown pre-recorded videotaped footage of “other participants” that merely looked as though it were being broadcast live from other cubicles. We filmed non-professional student actors (“confederates”) ahead of time, speaking to the camera timed with the experimenter’s prompts. We then showed the real participant footage of a group of other students who were either all of a different or the same gender or race as the participant. In this way, we could create gender solo status for female participants by showing them videotaped confederates who were all male, and for male participants by showing them videotaped confederates who were all female. Similarly, we could create race solo status for African American participants by showing them videotaped confederates who were all White, and for White participants by showing them videotaped confederates who were all African American. Finally, we could create non-solo status conditions by showing participants videotaped confederates who were all the same gender or same race as they were, for comparison purposes. (Although solo status can be experienced in terms of other gender identities and different racial/ethnic groups, in the studies described here we focused on binary male/female gender identities and African American and White racial groups. Individuals may also experience solo status in terms of more than one identity, e.g., being an African American woman in a group of White men. Although we examined gender and race solo status independently, other recent research has examined these intersections of social identities in STEM settings, e.g., (27)). Of course, participants might see through the ruse and suspect that the “other group members” are actually pre-recorded actors. Questioning of participants after the study sessions ended indicated that the majority truly believed that the footage they saw was live footage of the other group members located in the other cubicles in the research suite; the few who suspected the deception were excluded from the data analysis. We were able to reduce suspicions and doubts among the participants by keeping the AV system interactions at a minimum; that is, rather than a complex back-and-forth exchange among the group, the confederates and 145
participant only answered brief yes/no-type questions asked by the experimenter (e.g., Experimenter: “Can you see and hear everyone ok?” Confederate: “Yes, I can.”). At the point at which participants were called on to engage in the “oral exam” task, the real participant was “randomly chosen” to be the first to answer questions on camera about the academic material he or she had studied; after the oral exam, the experimenter simply ended the session, and the participant was fully debriefed and the experimental ruse was explained. The oral exam performance was recorded by the experimenter, and with the participant’s consent, this recorded footage was later reviewed and the oral exam performance was scored for accuracy by independent judges. This constituted the main performance outcome measure: how many correct details the participant provided while being questioned about the previously studied material. This experimental approach has several distinct advantages. Random assignment of students to solo and non-solo conditions group serves to equalize any pre-existing differences between students. That is, some students might just be better at the task than others, be better at public speaking, or have developed their own strategies to help them cope with solo status experiences; but random assignment to groups essentially ensures that equal numbers of people with these characteristics are represented in each experimental (vs. control) condition. Second, by using the videotaped confederate technique, we are able to control the behaviors of others towards the solo individual. Certainly if there are performance differences among people who experience solo status versus those who do not, that could be due to the solos being treated by others in the group in such a way as to diminish their performance. Evidence suggests that students can be treated in such a way as to elicit the type of performance (positive or negative) that is stereotypically expected of them by their instructors (28–30). By using the videotaped group members to induce solo status, we are able to eliminate the influence of biased treatment by others and examine the psychological experience of solo status per se, independent of discrimination.
Effects of Race Solo Status on African American and White Female Students In this study (15), we examined the effect of race solo status on African American and White college students. To isolate the effects of race solo status independent of cross-gender dynamics, we controlled for gender by only including female participants. Using the methodology described above, participants (78 college undergraduates) were randomly assigned to race solo status (being the only member of their race in the testing group) or race non-solo status (being in a same race testing group). They studied a set of academic information (taken from an upper level course on the social behaviors of animals), and answered questions aloud on it, believing that the others in their testing group could see and hear their performance. We analyzed their videorecorded oral exam performance. The results were striking. Analysis of Variance (ANOVA) on the oral exam accuracy scores showed a significant interaction between race of participant and race solo vs. non-solo status condition (see Figure 1). The performance of 146
African American and White women did not differ in the race non-solo condition; but African American women scored significantly lower than White women in the race solo status condition. Moreover, African American women scored significantly lower in the race solo compared to race non-solo condition, whereas White women’s scores did not significantly differ by condition.
Figure 1. Performance score showing the effect of race solo status on white and African American female participants. Data are from reference (15). These results indicate that the performance of African American women was significantly impaired by being the only person of their race in the testing group. When African American women performed in the context of other African American women (i.e., as non-solos), their performance was the same as that of Whites. On the positive side, this demonstrates that African American women had ability at the task equal to that of Whites, as their performance did not differ from Whites’ in the race non-solo condition, and was only diminished by the situation of race solo status. However, these findings also have a disturbing implication: that the underrepresentation of African American students at predominantly White universities may place them at a significant disadvantage, to the extent that they experience race solo status in academic performance settings. This possibility is also in line with work on performance evaluations in work settings, which showed that the performance ratings of Black employees was lower than that of White employees, particularly when Whites outnumbered Blacks in the organization (31). These results support the idea that solo status is negative when one stands out in terms of a devalued social identity. Because Black identity is socially devalued compared to White identity in US society, African American women had a more negative race solo status experience than did White women. This is supported by follow-up work on the subjective experience of race solo status for African American women, which showed that they reported feeling like a representative of their race, and that their performance would be generalized to African Americans as a whole, a psychological burden that raised anxiety about their performance 147
(2). Although the performance of White women was not impaired by being the only White person in the group, they could be affected by solo status when they stand out as distinctive in terms of an identity that is disadvantaged compared to the others in the testing group. The next study addresses this idea.
Effects of Gender Solo Status on White Male and Female Students Whereas URM students may experience race solo status in predominantly White contexts, female students may experience gender solo status in predominantly male contexts, including many STEM domains. Therefore, White women may underperform as gender solos testing in the context of men, similar to how African American women underperformed as race solos in the context of Whites. We conducted a study to test this prediction, again using the AV system procedure, but this time with White men and women (74 college undergraduates) doing the oral exam task as a gender solo (being the only person of their gender in the testing group) or a gender non-solo (being in a same-gender testing group). We isolated the effect of gender solo status by testing only White men and women, thereby controlling for cross-race dynamics. They again studied a set of academic information and answered questions aloud on it, believing that the others in their testing group could see and hear their performance. The previous study showed an effect of race solo status on an oral exam task, which has unique characteristics: it is a public performance (spoken aloud, presumably in front of an audience), and reflects accurate retrieval of previously learned information. Because participants in the race solo status experiment studied the information alone, without knowing yet of the racial composition of their testing group, this was primarily an effect of race solo status on performance or retrieval of information, rather than on learning or encoding the information. Is it possible that solo status impairs learning of new information as well as later recall of it? We designed our gender solo status experiment (15) to address this question. We recruited White men and women to participate, and randomly assigned them to experience gender solo status or not, both while learning a set of novel information, as well as when performing an oral exam over that information. Under the guise of comparing how groups communicate using the AV vs. a computer communication system, participants were told they had been assigned to the “video communication group” and would later meet members of the “computer communication group” located down the hall. Seated in their cubicle, participants then heard “another video group member” (again, the videotaped confederates) read aloud a page of academic information (again, on the social behaviors of animals), and also read aloud their own page of information, believing that they could be seen and heard by the others. This is how they learned the sets of information on which they would later be tested. After this learning stage, participants were told that some computer testing group members would join the video testing group, with some video group members switching rooms with computer group members located down the hall. The experimenter feigned fetching group members and individually relocating 148
them to different cubicles in the research suite. The end result of this elaborate shuffle was the participant was now in a testing group with different members than before. The oral exam occurred in this second group, and was videorecorded as before. Using this procedure, we were able to manipulate gender solo status in the first group (the learning stage) as well as in the second group (the retrieval or testing stage). That is, some participants experienced gender solo status at the learning stage but not the testing stage, and some experienced gender solo status at the testing stage but not the learning stage. Finally, a third group was assigned to be gender non-solos at both the learning and testing stages. ANOVA on the oral exam accuracy scores showed a significant interaction between participant gender and experimental condition (gender solo learning vs. gender solo testing vs non-solo control) (see Figure 2). The slight difference in the performance of men and women was not statistically significant in the non-solo control condition, when they both learned the information and tested on it in samegender groups. Performance was lower for both men and women in the gender solo learning condition, suggesting that standing out in terms of gender while learning information does impair men’s and women’s later recall of it compared to control, and does so equally for men and women. Of importance, men’s and women’s performance was differentially affected by gender solo status when experienced during testing: women scored significantly lower than men, and lower than women in the gender non-solo control condition. Men’s performance as gender solos during testing was equal to that of men in the gender non-solo control condition.
Figure 2. Performance score showing the effect of gender solo status experienced at learning or testing on White male and female participants. Data are from reference (15). The results of our gender solo status experiment showed that although men and women were equally affected by solo status when experienced during encoding of new information, women were more greatly affected than men when gender solo status is experienced during retrieval of that information. Women who learned the 149
information in a group of women but then did the oral exam task as the only woman in the group had poor performance, whereas the performance of men who learned the information in a group of men but then did the oral exam task as the only man in the group was not diminished compared to a control group. This suggests that when the task requires one to give a public performance of previously acquired knowledge or skills, women will be at a disadvantage when they must do that task in a predominantly male setting. This is important given that women in many STEM fields may find themselves faced with the task of publically relating their knowledge and skills (as in a conference presentation or job talk) in settings where they stand out in terms of their gender. Given the importance placed on these types of oral performances in evaluation (32), women may be distinctly disadvantaged when they give such performances before predominantly male audiences, as this situation impedes the expression of their knowledge and skills in their presentation. Of interest, in these studies the performance of White women was not affected by race solo status when in an otherwise all African American group, but was negatively affected by gender solo status in an otherwise all male group. This shows that it is not the case that White women’s public performance as solos is vulnerable due to something about their ability, but rather, that individuals are negatively affected when their situationally salient social identity (e.g., race or gender) is devalued or disadvantaged compared to the majority group in that setting. That is, in these studies White women were privileged in terms of race in the context of Black women, but were disadvantaged in terms of gender in the context of White men. These studies demonstrate a differential effect of solo status on the performance of members of high and low status social groups, with members of socially disadvantaged groups (such as women and URMs) being more negatively affected than members of socially privileged groups (such as Whites and men) when solo status is experienced during a public performance.
Gender Solo Status and Stereotype Threat Research on the effects of gender and race solo status on performance is important to employers and educators in STEM fields because the underrepresentation of women and URMs in these fields makes solo status a frequent experience for members of these groups, with important implications for their performance. Of course, in real-world contexts, women and URMs in STEM not only experience numerical minority status, but may also face negative societal stereotypes about their low suitability for STEM (11–13). These gender-STEM stereotypes have been shown to have strong effects on people who are targeted by these stereotypes, even independent of their numerical minority status (33). My final experiment explicitly examines the independent effects of solo status and gender-STEM stereotypes, given that women likely experience both of these in STEM settings. A sizable body of research has found that intellectual performance is significantly influenced by how one’s group is stereotyped in the testing domain (e.g., (34, 35)). The situation of stereotype threat is said to emerge when an individual perceives that his or her actions can be interpreted as potentially 150
confirming a stereotype held about their group (34–37). When a person’s group is stereotyped as poor performers in a given domain, the heightened concern that one might possibly confirm that stereotype by giving a poor performance can divert attention away from the task at hand and paradoxically result in diminished performance. For example, women are negatively stereotyped as having low ability in math (38–40). Many experiments have demonstrated that when a math task is described as a genuine assessment of one’s ability in math, women score lower than men do, even when factors such as quantitative SAT scores are matched across gender (34, 36), presumably due to women’s distracting concern that a poor performance would seem confirming of the negative stereotype about women in the eyes of others. However, experimental studies show that when the relevance of the stereotype to the test is removed, the detrimental effect on performance is lessened. For example, women’s performance is less affected by the negative stereotype when the math test is described as one in which gender differences typically do not emerge, or as a task that is simply not diagnostic of math ability (26, 34), because the quality of women’s performance in these situations is not perceived to have implications for confirming the stereotype. Therefore, stereotype threat appears to be an external or situational factor that, like solo status, can diminish the performance of women and URMs in STEM (41). Effects of stereotype threat have been demonstrated in a variety of social groups that are negatively stereotyped in various domains, such as students from low socioeconomic status backgrounds taking intellectual ability tests (42), older adults performing memory tasks (43). Results have also generalized to non-test score outcomes, such as athletic performance (44), driving performance (45), and the quality of interracial interaction (46–49). In the previous study on gender solo status, we purposefully controlled for the effects of these gender-STEM stereotypes by using a performance task that was neutral to these stereotypes. Specifically, we chose the topic of the social behavior of animals as opposed to a math-based task in order to isolate the effects of solo status from the effects of negative stereotyping (because women are specifically negatively stereotyped in STEM domains compared to the social behaviors of animals). In order to examine the potentially independent yet additive effects of gender solo status and stereotype threat, we used a math-based task in the next experiment. In developing our procedure, our goal was to manipulate gender solo status as before, using the AV system, but also to assign some participants to also experience stereotype threat regarding their performance task. In order to do this, we developed a special set of test material that could be feasibly described as “traditional math,” or as a special type of math material to which gender-STEM stereotypes were not relevant. The material was therefore not complex computational problems in multiple choice format (typical of standardized quantitative tests), but instead involved more narrative content, such as definitions of math theorems and math terms (e.g., the term “exponent” comes from the Latin words “ex” and “pons” meaning “placed out”). Using this material, we were able to describe it for half the participants as “traditional math,” making the oral exam therefore seen as diagnostic of math ability – a situation that induces stereotype threat for women. For the other half of participants, the material was 151
described as impervious to gender stereotypes, with the instructions “Although gender differences in test performance have been reported using traditional math materials, previous testing has shown that men and women perform equally well on this type of material” (following a procedure used in previous research; (34)). These contrasting descriptions of the test material constituted the stereotype threat manipulation. 157 White male and female college students were randomly assigned to one of four conditions, crossing gender solo status vs. non-solo status with stereotype threat vs. no threat conditions. This design allows to test whether the effects of these two situations – solo status and stereotype threat – are additive. In other words, is being a solo and testing in a stereotypic domain worse than being a solo or testing in a stereotypic domain? Figure 3 shows the oral examination mean scores for participants in each of the four conditions: gender solo status + stereotype threat (SS/ST), gender non-solo + stereotype threat (NS/ST), gender solo status + no threat (SS/NT), and gender non-solo + no threat (NS/NT). Results of ANOVA showed that the effects of solo status and stereotype threat had independent and differential effects on the performance of men and women. For female students, oral exam performance was worse when they experienced both gender solo status and stereotype threat (SS/ST). In this situation, women had to answer “traditional math” questions aloud in front of an all-male audience, and this situation was most detrimental to their performance. Women’s performance was best when they experienced neither gender solo status nor stereotype threat (NS/NT), answering questions about presumably non-diagnostic math material in an all-female group. In the two situations in which women experienced either gender solo status or stereotype threat, their performance was moderate, being better that when they experienced both, but worse than when they experienced neither. Finally, the performance of men did not differ at all across the four conditions.
Figure 3. Performance score showing the effect of gender solo status (SS) and stereotype threat (ST) on White male and female participants. Data are from reference (16). 152
These results highlight two important outcomes. First, the finding that women who experienced either gender solo status or stereotype threat performed worse than women who experienced neither showed that these two factors are independent and unique influences on women’s public performance. Gender solo status can diminish women’s outcomes even when the relevance of gender-STEM stereotypes is removed from the situation; and stereotype threat can impair performance even when women are in all-female settings. This is important because it suggests that when considering strategies to address situational factors that can harm women’s performance, efforts to reduce one factor might not alleviate changes in another factor. Second, the results show that men’s outcomes were unaffected by the being the only male present, or by taking a test believed to be diagnostic of math ability, likely because men are positively stereotyped and well represented in math-intensive domains. This is consistent with earlier field research showing that solo men on otherwise all-female work teams advanced to management positions quicker than men who were in mixed gender work teams (17), suggesting that not only are men not disadvantaged by gender solo status but can actually benefit from it in some circumstances (50, 51). Men therefore may be relatively immune to the subtle situational factors that have a significant negative effect on women in predominantly male STEM domains.
Conclusion This experimental research on race and gender solo status speaks to the issue of lack of racial and gender diversity in institutions, work domains, and fields of study. The work suggests that the experience of solo status in terms of one’s race, gender, or other social identity is not equal among groups that differ in social standing, as members of socially disadvantaged or negatively stereotyped groups (e.g., URMs, White women in STEM, sexual minorities, people with disabilities) are more negatively affected than are members of socially privileged or positively stereotyped groups (e.g., Whites, men in STEM, heterosexual and cisgender people, and people without disabilities). When settings such as institutions, work domains, and fields of study are dominated by socially privileged groups, the effects of solo status and stereotyping may produce a negative cycle or feedback loop: women and URMs, being in the numerical minority, experience solo status which diminishes their outcomes in these settings, and these diminished outcomes in turn lead women and URMs to leave the setting, or to choose not to enter or be denied entrance to the setting in the first place. Thus, action must be taken in order to intervene and break the cycle. Researchers have worked on interventions based on social science research findings (52). One obvious strategy to mitigate the negative effects of solo status would be to eliminate solo status altogether; indeed, research has demonstrated the importance of preventing solo status situations in evaluative performance settings, by not forming STEM student teams with a solo woman (53) or not having only one woman or URM candidate on STEM job shortlists (54), for example. Other work has shown the power of having same-gender peers and role models to increase participation and retention among women in STEM (55–58). Women’s math test 153
scores have been shown to be incrementally higher as the gender composition of their test taking group includes more women (59), and African American students were found to score higher on academic tests when the test administrator was also African American (60, 61), underscoring the importance of increasing gender and racial in STEM among both students and faculty. Increasing diversity among students is a goal at many universities, and programs have been also developed designed to increase diversity and excellence among faculty (particularly in STEM domains), using strategies informed by social science evidence (62). The issue of increasing diversity, and thus reducing the likelihood of minority group members experiencing solo status, is complex and our efforts may be long in producing significant and lasting change. Findings from social science research, in both field and laboratory contexts, can both highlight the critical importance of the problem, and provide the basis for effective solutions.
Acknowledgments This paper is based on content from a presentation at the National Diversity Equity Workshop 2011 on January 25th, 2011.
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