Assistant Professor of Psychology Gili Freedman and collaborators including Bella Moutoux '22 and Isobel Hermans '22 recently published an article titled “She made a mean beef stroganoff: Analyzing the Finkbeiner Test in newspaper articles about women in STEM" in the journal Communication Monographs.
In this manuscript, researchers examine how journalists write about women who have won the Nobel Prize in a STEM field. Specifically, they did an archival analysis of four newspapers with articles dating from 1903 to 2020, and we tested whether the way journalists write about women Nobel laureates has changed over time. They found that over time, journalists were more likely to write about the fact that the laureates were women, but they were less likely to describe their husbands' occupations in the articles. In a second experimental study, researchers tested whether emphasizing the gender of the Nobel laureates affects the way that women and women in STEM are perceived, but they did not find any effects of this gender emphasis manipulation. Taken together, it seems that gender may be more emphasized in more recent articles about women in STEM, but the effects of those journalistic choices are unclear.
