Colloquium Polaris - Isabelle Regner will explain the influence of gender stereotypes on cognitive performance

Action plans to promote gender equality in the civil service have led to a number of advances. However, inequalities remain within the workforce in terms of recruitment, promotion, access to the most prestigious positions, and representation in the scientific disciplines known as STEM (Science, Technology, Computing and Mathematics). Research in Social Cognition has helped to show that these inequalities are, at least in part, linked to gender stereotypes which still today lead to a greater association of leadership, management and scientific skills with men than with women. Some results will be presented here to help us understand how these stereotypes have a negative impact on women's performance and generate subtle biases and processes of discrimination by influencing the decisions of evaluators when recruiting and promoting. This talk will be in French

Isabelle Régner is a University Professor in Social Psychology at the Cognitive Psychology Laboratory (UMR CNRS 7290) at Aix-Marseille University. She directed the Centre des Sciences Sociales pour les Sciences from 2014 to 2020 and was appointed Vice-President for gender equality and anti-discrimination in January 2020. Since 2021, she is a member of the GT9 "Equity and reduction of school inequalities" of the Conseil Scientifique de l'Éducation Nationale, as well as a member of the Steering Committee for the "National Training Plan: Training for equality between girls and boys" of the Institut des Hautes Etudes de l'Education et de la Formation (IH2EF). Her work focuses on the social regulation of cognitive functioning in the laboratory and in natural settings (academic and clinical). In particular, she studies the effect of social stereotypes on performance and evaluation in different skill domains (mathematics, reading, memory) and with different populations (children, young adults, dyslexic adults, selection committees, elderly people, and patients in the prodromal phase of Alzheimer's disease). She is the author of about fifty scientific publications in international journals and participates in numerous conferences for the general public.