Abstract
Gender stereotypes affect both women and men from childhood. Whereas men may be more often associated with STEM careers, women tend to be associated with nurturing and caring careers. The present research used an explicit scale and the Implicit Relational Assessment Procedure to investigate how gender–career relational patterns could vary for Brazilian college students according to their gender and career. Both instruments included the names of careers stereotypically regarded as “male” or “female” and words indicating gender. Participants were divided into four groups (men and women in STEM and the humanities). A significant pro-male–STEM bias emerged for all groups, except the STEM-female group, the only group to show a significant pro-female-STEM bias (p < .05) and a significant difference from the other three groups. A significant implicit pro-men–male career bias was mostly more substantial among male students. In the explicit scales, participants tended to show a more neutral evaluation (not classifying careers as “male” or “female”). Correlations were found between explicit evaluations for male careers and the implicit trial type “women–male careers,” indicating that the more a career was explicitly evaluated as male, the more easily it was related with “women” as false at the implicit level.
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Notes
Although the IRAP has been used frequently as a psychometric instrument, such as in the present study, it has recently received considerable attention as a procedure to investigate the dynamics of relational responding. The discovery that IRAP responding may be affected by functional properties, such as the orienting function of stimuli, that may even supersede the relational properties led to the Differential Arbitrarily Applicable Relational Responding Effects model (DAARRE; see Finn et al., 2018; Schmidt et al., 2021). The DAARRE model was incorporated into the multidimensional multilevel framework, creating the hyperdimensional multilevel (HDML) framework, distinguishing five levels of relational responding and four dimensions. The HDML framework (Barnes-Holmes et al., 2021), in conjunction with the levels and dimensions, considers the interaction of functional (evoking and orienting) and relational aspects of relational responding. This promising approach is, however, beyond the scope of the present article, which deals with the IRAP just as a psychometric instrument to measure the strength, in different populations, of relations between gender and careers.
Note that in most Brazilian colleges and universities, students are enrolled from the beginning in specific courses, such as psychology, medicine, and engineering; the undergraduate degree (which may require 4 to 6 years, depending on the course) is the minimal requirement to practice as psychologists, physicians, engineers, and so forth. Undergraduate courses are usually designated by the career to which they give access.
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Funding
Murilo Moreira was supported by the Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior–Brasil (Finance Code 001, Grant 88887.368414/2019-00). João H. de Almeida was supported by a postdoctoral fellowship from the São Paulo Research Foundation (FAPESP; Grant 2014-01874-7). Júlio C. de Rose was supported by a research productivity grant from the Brazilian National Council for Scientific and Technological Development (CNPq). The research reported here was part of the research program of the National Institute for Science and Technology on Behavior, Cognition, and Teaching, supported by FAPESP (Grant 014/50909-8) and CNPq (Grant 465686/2014-1).
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Murilo Moreira contributed to the research conceptualization, procedure planning, data collection, data analysis, and writing of the article. João H. de Almeida contributed to the research conceptualization, procedure planning, data analysis, and writing of the article. Júlio C. de Rose contributed to the research conceptualization, procedure planning, writing, and review of the article.
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The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this article.
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Data are available at https://www.researchgate.net/publication/346542029_career-gender_study_data.
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This article is based on part of the master’s thesis of Murilo Moreira, submitted to the Graduate Program in Psychology of the Federal University of São Carlos, Brazil, under the joint supervision of the other two authors. We thank Deisy de Souza, chairperson of the National Institute for Science and Technology on Behavior, Cognition, and Teaching, for her support and encouragement.
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Moreira, M., de Almeida, J.H. & de Rose, J.C. The Impact of Career Choice on the Implicit Gender–Career Bias Among Undergraduate Brazilian Students. Behav. Soc. Iss. 30, 465–480 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s42822-021-00075-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s42822-021-00075-x