Do gender and occupational stereotypes affect the stereotypes of Asians?

摘要

Asians have been stereotyped positively based on the competence in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) occupations. However, Asians have not been promoted because of the stereotypes regarding Asians' personality (i.e., lacking social skills). Moreover, Asians are expected to be obedient because those stereotypes became prescriptive (i.e., Asians should be passive and obedient). This tendency is pronounced for Asian females because of a gender stereotype (i.e., females are more nurturing and caring than males). Especially, working mothers tend to be perceived as less warm than non-working mothers, thus female Asian engineers may risk being perceived as incompetent based on their gender and less warm when they have children. The purpose of this quantitative study was to investigate whether gender or occupation had a stronger effect on the stereotypes of Asians regarding competence and warmth based on the Stereotype Content Model. The population was American citizens, who were born and grew up in the USA. Participants were recruited through an Internet survey tool, SurveyMonkeyTM and completed the Scale of Anti-Asian American Stereotypes (SAAAS: Lin, Kwan, Cheung, & Fiske, 2005) imagining four groups: Asian male engineers, Asian female engineers, Asian male homemakers, and Asian female homemakers. The research design was a 2 (gender) x 2 (occupation: engineer or homemaker) repeated-measures design. The dependent variables were competence and warmth scores of the SAAAS. Main findings are as follows. First, Asian engineers were perceived as more competent than Asian homemakers regardless of their gender. Second, there were no significant differences in warmth ratings for all the four groups. Future studies should examine competence perception toward Asians with different occupations (e.g., lawyer) because stereotype consistency might moderate the effect of occupation and gender. In addition, requirements of an occupation may affect the perception of competence and warmth, for example, nurses may be perceived as more warm than competent than Asian engineers because nurses are required hospitality.