System justification beliefs moderate attitudes about gender imbalance in mathematics

The purpose of the present study is to understand how women's justification of the status quo moderates their attitudes towards mathematics, a domain in which they are underrepresented. Regardless of the benefits or misfortunes that result from a group's position within the status hierarchy, group members may still view the status quo as fair and legitimate. Moreover, how group members view the status quo can impact their willingness to challenge their position within the status hierarchy. This thesis incorporates two lines of research (inequality of men and women in mathematics and research on system justification) in an attempt to help answer the following question of why women are not entering typically male-dominated fields such as mathematics. In a prior experiment I found that participants low in GSJ expressed more negative emotions in the unequal condition and less negative emotions in the equal condition. Participants high in GSJ showed less of a disparity in negative emotions between the two conditions. The second experiment attempted to expand on these findings. For experiment two, 41 undergraduate students first completed the GSJ measure then were randomly assigned to one of the stereotype threat (control, threat, no threat) and male math representation (equal or unequal) conditions. All participants then completed the emotional reactions and mathematics attitudes measures. It was hypothesized that under stereotype threat conditions, those high in GSJ will have more negative attitudes (e.g., less interest and lowered math self-efficacy) towards mathematics, but show little negative emotional reactions (compared to those low in GSJ) when presented with the unequal as opposed equal representation condition. The analyses revealed that for participants under stereotype threat there were no significant differences for those in the equal or unequal representation conditions, whether high or low in GSJ, on negative emotions or mathematics attitudes. Future researchers could expand on these studies to include a direct comparison of women already in specific STEM majors and those in other majors where women are not typically underrepresented to see if there are differences in the ways these groups justify a particular status quo that is more or less relevant to them.