Women Aren't Good in Math . . . or Are They?: Strange but true: Women score much lower on math tests if they are first asked unrelated questions about gender issues. The phenomenon is called 'stereotype threat' -- a kind of performance anxiety discovered in 1995 when psychologists found that black students at Stanford University did significantly worse on intelligence tests if they were first asked to identify their race on the test form.
Since then, dozens of other experiments have confirmed that subtly cuing women or minorities to think subconsciously about their sex or race causes them do poorly in areas where the stereotype suggests they are weak.
