MY RESEARCH FOCUSES on inequity in education. When children are exposed to negative stereotypes early on, that may affect their educational path and may lead them to decisions that are not optimal for their careers. I try to understand the barriers to students fulfilling their potential.
In one of my papers published in the Quarterly Journal of Economics, I found that girls’ exposure to teachers’ stereotypes, as measured by the implicit association test, negatively affected their probability of enrolling in STEM [Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics] and also negatively affected their self-confidence. This is very important because often we observe that girls tend to have lower self-confidence in STEM, but this is induced by stereotypes that they are exposed to and by their teachers’ gender stereotypes, rather than innate.
In my research, I also focus on teachers’ bias against immigrant children. In a paper accepted by the American Economic Review, my coauthors and I find that teachers hold negative stereotypes about immigrant children. We find that, for immigrant children, being exposed to negative stereotypes affected their grades. We tried to think about how increasing awareness of teachers’ implicit stereotypes can help mitigate these biases.
“Public education offers opportunities to solve deep problems in society. But it can also perpetrate biases and stereotypes.”
This study took place in Italy, where immigration is a pretty recent phenomenon. At the beginning of 2000, there were less than 4% of immigrants in Italian schools. Right now, the average share of immigrants in the school system is above 20%. This implies that most of the teachers that are currently teaching in school were not exposed to immigration when they grew up.
We implemented a randomized controlled trial in which half the teachers received information about their implicit stereotypes and the other half did not. What we found was that, for teachers that were informed about their implicit associations, their gap in gr