“Does Stereotype Threat Contribute to the Political Knowledge Gender Gap? A Preregistered Replication Study of 2018”, 2023-03-16 ():
The gender gap in political knowledge is a well-established finding in Political Science. One explanation for gender differences in political knowledge is the activation of negative stereotypes about women.
As part of the Systematizing Confidence in Open Research and Evidence (SCORE) program, we conducted a two-stage preregistered and high-powered direct replication of Study 2 of 2018.
While we successfully replicated the gender gap in political knowledge—such that male participants performed better than female participants—both the first (n = 671) and second stage (n = 831) of the replication of the stereotype activation effect were unsuccessful. Taken together (pooled n = 1,502), results indicate evidence of absence of the effect of stereotype activation on gender differences in political knowledge.
We discuss potential explanations for these findings and put forward evidence that the gender gap in political knowledge might be an artifact of how knowledge is measured.
[Keywords: stereotype threat, political knowledge, gender gap, political behavior, replication, open data, preregistered direct replication]
…We note that our failure to replicate the effect of stereotype threat on gender differences in political knowledge is consistent with recent research efforts challenging the effect of stereotype threat on academic performance more broadly. 2012 showed that only 30% of efforts aiming to replicate the gender gap in mathematical performance do succeed. In addition, a meta-analysis investigating the effect of gender stereotype threats on the performance of schoolgirls in stereotyped subjects (eg. science, math) indicated several signs of publication bias within this literature (2015). Given these results, it is plausible that the effect of gender stereotype activation might be small in magnitude and/or might be decreasing over time (2019).