[demewmew]

The lack of compassion here demonstrated by people who clearly have not even tried to empathize with the experiences of those with stereotype threat is disheartening. It's a phenomenon backed by increasing amounts of research and as someone who has dealt with it for years I am excited to see that it is finally getting so much attention.

For those of you who are actually able to empathize a bit here, I found the APA paper "Stereotype Threat at Work" http://www.apa.org/education/ce/stereotype-threat.pdf to be especially useful in communicating with managers, mentors and peers about what I was experiencing in the workplace. I don't think there are easy solutions to this issue, but bringing a little awareness and kindness to situations where a member of your team might have their stereotype threat activated can really go a long way.

As hackers we typically care about efficiency, and stereotype threat is making some of our peers less efficient. If you think it's just a matter of "getting over it," your empathy skills could use a little work. A lot of this stuff is unconscious and impossible to unwire after a lifetime of being fed cultural stereotypes.