And what her mom actually says to her has the exact opposite effect.
Her mom says, well honey, you know, maybe you were overreaching.
Maybe it just wasn't meant to be.
Maybe you should've gone to a community college first.
So Vanessa is not only internally facing all these feelings of Imposter Syndrome,
but then she's hearing it externally, as well.
She shouldn't be there, she should be somewhere else.
And so Vanessa is experiencing one manifestation of
something that's essentially called Stereotype Threat.
There's these expectations, these external expectations for what she should and
shouldn't do as, for example, a first generation young black college student.
She maybe should have gone to community college first instead of going to
the flagship university.
That's of course not true.
Vanessa should do very well at UT Austin.
She deserves to be there.
But she's seeing all this external pressure
that maybe she's made the wrong choice.
It can happen in more subtle situations, as well.
So, there are many stereotypes out there, and
one in particular in the Western world is that men are better than women at math.
So, when you're asked to think about somebody who's good at math,
typically a Western person thinks about this guy here, this white guy,
nerdy, pocket protector, with a sheet full of equations.
And that's just kind of the stereotype that exists.
So, let's say that I, being a woman, am going to go in and
take a very challenging math test.
Now, I'm good at math.
The other people who are taking the test are good at math.
But when I walk into the room, here's what I see.
I see a bunch of people who uphold the stereotype that I have in my head
that men are good at math, and women aren't as good.
Now what happens to me when I walk into that room is that,
that stereotype activates in my head.
And it turns out there are some researchers who did a study, Spencer,
Steele, and Quinn, that when women are put into these situations and
they're reminded of this stereotype, that men are better than women at math,
they actually perform worse on the test.
It's not that they are worse at math.
It's just that their performance is hindered by being reminded of
these stereotypes.
And this again, is what's known as Stereotype Threat.
It's the idea that, I am now a representative of this class of people,
of women.
And so I have this added pressure to do well on this test.
Because I worry that if I don't do well on this test, I'm going to be upholding this
stereotype, this negative stereotype that I really don't want to uphold.
And that thinking just gets in my way of my ability to
think about the mathematical problems that I would need to be working on.
And for people who are in the majority group, they've shown that
they don't have this extra thinking that they have to cope with.
They're not worried about upholding some stereotype,
because it's just sort of that's the norm, that's what everybody accepts.
And so they do better on the test itself.