This study includes two experiments designed to assess the effects of occupational gender-related stereotypes on information processing and memory performance. These two experiments were conducted in two separate cohorts of undergraduate students (N = 107 and N = 96, respectively). In each of them, we assessed (and confirmed) the presence of an implicit association preferentially linking high status attributes to men using the Implicit Association Test (IAT). We also assessed the effective incorporation of this association into gender-schemata and its consequences for information processing with a memory task that involved remembering the feminine and masculine forms of high or low status professional occupations. Results indicated that, independently of their gender, participants were more likely to forget and less likely to falsely recall the feminine forms of high status professions, whereas the opposite was true for the masculine forms of high status professions. The magnitude of these memory biases was correlated with the IAT scores. Moreover, in agreement with the predictions of gender-schemata theory, these memory biases (and their correlations with IAT scores) were predominantly observed when participants were not adverted that their recall would be evaluated later on (incidental-encoding memory task; Experiment 1), but less so when participants were explicitly instructed to memorize the same feminine and masculine forms of high or low status professional occupations (intentional encoding memory task; Experiment 2). Taken together, these results call into question the notion that gender stereotypes about professional occupations are declining, and they highlight a “men-high-status” association as a major component of these occupational stereotypes.

Based on Social Cognitive Career Theory principles, the present study sought to investigate whether stereotype threat experiences could act as a barrier and reduce the persistence of women in math-intensive activities. More specifically, we assessed whether the experimental activation of stereotypes about women’s lower math capabilities affected the performance, persistence, and self-selected difficulty of engineering students in a math task which required sustained effort. We also evaluated the relationships between these effects and the participants’ pre-testing gender-science stereotypes and math self-concept. A sample of 340 engineering students (175 and 165 self-identified as males and females, respectively) were recruited and randomly assigned to a control (Con) or stereotype threat (StA) condition to form four similarly sized groups. All participants rated their self-concept in four academic domains (math, chemistry, physics, and coding), completed the gender-science Implicit Association Test, and a “reading comprehension task” that served to promote the stereotype threat manipulation immediately before facing a modified version of the Math Effort Task (M-MET). We observed that, in the control condition, M-MET performance, self-selected difficulty, and persistence were similar in female and male participants, independent of their gender-science implicit stereotypes but correlated to their math self-concept scores. In contrast, the StA condition triggered opposite effects in female and male students, so they showed decreased/enhanced M-MET performance and self-selected difficulty, respectively. This experimental condition also resulted in enhanced persistence of the male students without affecting the number of trials completed by female students. These effects were correlated with the strength of the participants’ gender-science implicit stereotypes but not with their math self-concept scores. In fact, as revealed by finer-grain analyses, stereotype threat only had a significant impact on individuals harboring stereotypical gender-science implicit associations. Therefore, it is concluded that: (1) stereotypes can promote differences between male and female engineering students in their performance, self-confidence, and persistence in math-related activities; (2) These effects seem to be more prominent in individuals implicitly perceiving science as a masculine domain. The relevance of these findings to explain women’s enhanced abandonment rates of math-intensive studies is discussed.