IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - March 2020 - 15

potential; and prescriptive: related to
women who violate the rules for how
men and women "should" behave.
The prescriptive nature of gender
stereotypes may result in negative reactions to females exhibiting
"masculine" traits such as authority
or agency. The sheer awareness of
the risk of being subject to various
social and economic reprisals as a
result of not fulfilling a gender stereotype or norm is known as fear
of backlash [11], [15]. This may be
seen as one of the forces that keeps
women out of so-called "masculine"
domains, where they are bound to
face the gender double blind. Rudman and Fairchild [14] demonstrated in their experiments that when
negative reactions to stereotype
violation were likely, both genders
decided to show greater gender
conformity, even if they were aware
of the fact this maintains stereotypes in their perceivers.
In conclusion, if our goal is such
that the assessment of the probability of a person's success in STEM
should not be contingent on knowing her or his gender, then we need
to deal with multiple issues. Some
of them relate to how we define
the STEM field itself, others relate
to personal interests, relative judgments of individual talent, and success expectancies. Those success
expectancies and value judgments
are socially constructed forecasts -
predictions about possible enjoyment, usefulness, importance for
identity, and cost. The issue is that
there is a general lack of ability in
terms of such forecasting. People
greatly underestimate the degree of
change that they might experience
in the upcoming decade of their
lives. Quoidbach et al. [12] call it the
"end of history" illusion. They have
found that both young and older
people believe that they might have
changed a lot in the past, but that

MARCH 2020

they will not change much in the
future. We all seem to assume that
we are "now" the person we "will be"
for the rest of our lives, but this is an
illusion. The future in complex, nonlinear systems, with multiple complicated interactions, is uncertain with
the possibility of small causes having large effects.

Author Information
Łukasz Tanas´ , Katarzyna Winkowska-Nowak, and Joanna Roszak are
with the SWPS University of Social
Sciences and Humanities, Warsaw,
Poland. Email: ltanas@swps.edu.pl.
Katarzyna Pote˛ga vel Z·abik is with
the SWPS University of Social Sciences and Humanities, Warsaw,
Poland; the Copernicus Science
Center, Warsaw, Poland, and the Polish-Japanese Academy of Information Technology, Warsaw, Poland.

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IEEE TECHNOLOGY AND SOCIETY MAGAZINE

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IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - March 2020

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