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Essay on Stereotyping
Stereotyping is a normal part of the process in which people organize information about the world they live in, simplifying its complexity. As such, stereotypes are not necessarily biased or wrong. The problem is that people often associate particular characteristics with groups of people that are inaccurate or that may not apply to any given member of that group. That thought process then can lead to distorted expectations and judgments of people's behavior and form the basis for discriminatory treatment (American Psychological Association. 1991, 1061-1070).
We can say media, clothing, music choice, etc. are responsible for stereotyping. Considerable research on sex stereotypes has shown that traits that are desirable in highly valued and influential jobs—competence, independence, self-confidence, and achievement orientation—are consistent with stereotypes about men and inconsistent with stereotypes about women. As a result, women face an uphill battle even being selected for such jobs, let alone getting good reviews for performing them. Moreover, when a woman is successful, her performance is often attributed to luck rather than her abilities, as it would be for a man. The same has been found to be true for people of color, who are also sometimes assumed to be less competent than Euro-American men.
The use of negative stereotypes in hiring or promotion decisions is sometimes called "statistical discrimination" (Braddock and McPartland 1987, 5-39). Even where an employer makes an effort to hire according to a set of explicit, predetermined qualification requirements (as is the case for most government jobs), the selection decision always requires some subjective judgments. It is not uncommon for selecting officials, anxious to get someone on board quickly, to rely on race/ethnicity or gender as shorthand means for predicting the candidate's potential performance on the job. For example, Ivy Kennelly (1999) found that employers in Atlanta associated African American women with being single mothers, and therefore likely to be late or absent from work (168-192)......
