How a Blurry Cow Inspired Me to Research Gender Stereotypes
By Isabella Greco, senior at Bronx High School of Science and Regeneron Science Talent Search 2017 finalist
As a young kid watching frogs in my grandma’s backyard, I became fascinated by questions of cognition and behavior — what do other animals, and humans, perceive? What do they remember? And what influences those perceptions and memories?
Thanks to a great middle school science teacher, Ms. Kissoon, I was encouraged to pursue my interest in this topic through research projects. My first effort followed a suggestion to replicate a study on magnetoreception in cows using images from Google Earth. There had recently been research which suggested that cows had an ability to sense the earth’s magnetic field, an ability also known as magnetoreception, evidenced by their tendency to align themselves with magnetic north. I remember my 12-year-old self researching cattle ranches to find new locations to study, being surrounded by printouts from Google Earth, and carefully drawing lines and measuring angles for each blurry cow image to determine the cow’s orientation to magnetic north. I loved collecting the data and making my own analysis of it.
This was the study that first piqued my desire to conduct my own research projects. I wanted to take it further, though, and try designing my own methods from scratch. The next year I did a project studying pigeon behavior, and it only consolidated my aspiration to do research, particularly cognitive and behavioral research. One of my top reasons for attending the Bronx High School of Science was that I knew the school would support my goal.
At Bronx Science, my focus shifted toward human cognition and memory. I became fascinated by the impact of stereotypes on memory. Stereotypes are an aspect of our everyday lives, and they can affect us more than we realize, whether we’re subject to them or whether we’re using them in our judgments.
As I reviewed previous studies on the impact of stereotypes, they brought to mind instances from my daily life — for example, how people would assume my math and science teachers were male, and that my English teachers were female. Also, being in a single-parent family, I noticed an interesting pattern whenever I was asked about a second parent. No one raised questions if I mentioned my mother meeting me at school or taking my brother and me somewhere. But if the question of careers came up, after I explained what my mother did for a living, I would always be asked about a father and his job.
Perhaps in part because of these observations in my own life, I became interested in exploring the impact of gender stereotypes on memories of occupations and accomplishments. Would the career biography of a male nurse be remembered as accurately as the identical biography of a female nurse? Would the career biography of a teacher be remembered as accurately as the biography of a pilot? I was lucky to find a mentor, Professor Mitchell Rabinowitz at Fordham University, who wanted to help me pursue these questions.
In my research — which led to me being selected as a Regeneron Science Talent Search finalist — I found that subjects had a higher rate of false memory for jobs stereotypically associated with women (such as nurse or schoolteacher) than they had for jobs stereotypically associated with men (such as pilot or engineer). Moreover, for the feminine-associated jobs, subjects were more likely to falsely remember the employed person as having achieved less compared to similar false statements that increased achievement. This contributes to evidence from previous studies suggesting that the gender wage gap is formed, in part, due to a bias against feminine jobs. Existing research suggests that when a job becomes primarily associated with women, the overall pay declines as a result of the occupation itself being devalued. My research further suggests this perspective by indicating that it’s the job itself that triggers a cognitive bias, more so than the gender of the employee in this case.
I hope that my study inspires further research on the impact of stereotypes on false memory and more examination of people’s views of occupations that are associated with a particular gender. I also hope that my findings can inform policymakers and others working to mitigate the gender wage gap. I’m very excited about continuing research on these topics in college. While some might see this as a large shift from protractors and blurry cows, I see it as a continuation of a goal to expand our knowledge of perception and memory — an effort supported by great teachers and mentors all along the way.
