Home > Events > HDQM Colloquium: Lin Bian (Cornell)
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HDQM Colloquium: Lin Bian (Cornell)

Time: 
Wednesday, October 28, 2020 - 12:15 PM to 1:30 PM
Location: 
https://umd.zoom.us/j/97400160413?pwd=eEZTVXlOV0t0bGZVeDNLVnJSUXIzUT09

 

The roots of gender gap in academia and beyond

Abstract: Intellectual giftedness is culturally associated with men rather than women. I will describe a line of research that investigates the acquisition and consequences of this “brilliance = men” stereotype. With respect to acquisition, I will present evidence that, by the age of 6, girls are already less likely than boys to believe that members of their gender are “really, really smart.” Next, I will document two consequences of this stereotype. First, the idea that brilliance is a male trait undermines girls’ and women’s interest in activities that are believed to require a high level of intellectual ability. Second, this stereotype gives rise to biases against girls and women in contexts where brilliance is seen as important. Finally, I will present some recent results on children’s racial stereotypes about intelligence. These findings speak to the early acquisition of cultural connections between brilliance and certain social categories, and to the potential role of these stereotyped notions in creating and sustaining inequities in career outcomes.

Bio: Dr. Lin Bian is the Evalyn Edwards Milman Assistant Professor in Human Development at Cornell University. She is joining the Department of Psychology at the University of Chicago in January 2021. Lin obtained her Ph.D. in Developmental Psychology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where she worked with Drs. Andrei Cimpian and Renee Baillargeon. Then, she completed her postdoctoral training at Stanford University with Dr. Ellen Markman. Her research examines the development of social cognition, with an emphasis on children’s reasoning about social categories. In this vein, she has pursued two major lines of research: One line of work focuses on the acquisition and consequences of stereotypes about social groups for children’s interests and motivation. The other line of work focuses on infants’ and toddlers’ sociomoral expectations, especially as how they apply to behaviors within vs. across group boundaries.