Sapna Cheryan just received an award from the Paris-Dauphine Foundation to examine gender role perceptions. Award title: Effects of Intersectional Gender Roles on Women in STEM. This project addresses a gap in the literature on gender and STEM. Foundational work in the psychology literature theorized that men and women face different gender role perceptions (Eagly et al., 2000; Heilman, 2001). For example, in the U.S., men are expected to be agentic and self-oriented while women are expected to be communal and other-oriented. These gender role perceptions (i.e., expectations that people have of women and men) formed the basis for many influential theories on gender disparities in STEM (e.g., Cheryan et al., 2009; Diekman et al., 2011). However, the original work establishing gender role perceptions was conducted on majority White samples. In this proposal, we examine how gender role perceptions may differ when provided by people of color about their own racial/ethnic groups. We then use these new gender role perceptions to theorize and test how research on gender and STEM may be made more inclusive and accurate for women of color.
