What effect can stereotypes have on your efforts for successful diversity management Dr. Claude Steele, Stanford University School of Education Dean, former provost of Columbia University and recognized leader in the field of social psychology, spoke at a Fair360, formerly DiversityInc learning event on how negative stereotypes perpetuate the achievement gap between Blacks and whites and limit the workforce talent potential.
Reprinted from WHISTLING VIVALDI: And Other Clues to How Stereotypes Affect Us. Copyright 2010 by Claude M. Steele with the permission of the publisher, W.W. Norton & Company, Inc. This selection may not be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher.
This book is about what my colleagues and I call identity contingenciesthe things you have to deal with in a situation because you have a given social identity, because you are old, young, gay, a white male, a woman, Black, Latino, politically conservative or liberal, diagnosed with bipolar disorder, a cancer patient and so on. Generally speaking, contingencies are circumstances you have to deal with in order to get what you want or need in a situation. In the Chicagoland of my youth, in order to go swimming at the public pool I had to restrict my pool going to Wednesday afternoons. That’s a contingency. What makes this an identity contingency is that the people involved had to deal with it because they had a particular social identity in the situation. Other people didn’t have to deal with it, just the people who had the same identity I had.
