Gender Stereotypical Beliefs: Implicit Stereotypes towards Occupations and the Effect of Exposure to Counter-stereotypic Examples

Gender stereotypes lead people to categorize occupations on a continuum of feminine and masculine jobs. This study examined the mediating effect of exposure to counter-stereotypic examples in decreasing implicit stereotypical beliefs about gender role-typed jobs.
Two related studies, investigated the exposure to counter-stereotypic examples by means of writing a text and watching part of a movie. In the first study, 61 students of University of Tehran (32 female) and in the second study 57 students of University of Tehran (32 female) were voluntarily enrolled. The participants were implicitly exposed to stereotypic (control group) and counter-stereotypic (experiment group) examples. Implicit Association Test (IAT) program was used in order to measure the implicit stereotypes. Independent t-test was used to analyze the data.
Independent t-test revealed significant differences between implicit stereotype scores of control and experimental groups in both studies. In addition, results from the first experiment showed that women had higher stereotypical beliefs about gender role-typed jobs. However, this result was not confirmed in the second study.
The present investigation demonstrated that exposure to gender-related stimuli and job can activate implicit stereotypes about gender role-typed jobs. However, exposure to counter-stereotypic examples in comparison to stereotypic example before the evaluation, led to a lesser extent activation of stereotypes.