Stereotype Threat
Everyone should have the freedom and courage to pursue a path they want. During the process, there might be a million obstacles that try to get in our way, “Stereotype Threat” is one of it. Most of us have to overcome these obstacles to achieve greatness.
In short, stereotype threat refers to the negative psychological impact brought by being in situation in which the person has the potential to confirm a negative stereotype about his or her social group.
6 months ago, I quit my well-paid sales & trading job to pursuit software development. The reason I did that was simple: I wanted to learn programming so I can build meaningful products that can make a difference in people’s lives.
One of my best friend is a quite successful engineer(not gonna mention his name here); he works as part of a core engineering team in one of the most influential technology company in Silicon Valley.
When I told my friend of this decision, he was shocked and tried to stop me. “You were not born to be an engineer” he said, “You are a talented salesman, but salespeople’s brain works differently than engineers. You are not a geek so why are you trying to do geeky things?”
He thinks that because I failed to meet almost every criteria of the stereotype engineer, my pursuit of becoming an engineer is doomed to fail. The discussion quickly turned into a heated argument between me and him. Although he was a good friend, but this time I decided to ignore his criticism and push on with my decision to learn programming. Now 6 months later, I couldn’t be happier with the decision.
Stereotyping have always been used as a barrier to stop other people to pursue different paths or behave differently. I believe this is wrong. The world evolves because everyone is a unique individual and we have unique ideas. This diversification of ideas and behaviors is the driving force behind our democratic social system and innovation in technology. Stereotyping attempts to forcefully categorize people in groups and stuck them there forever.
Do not believe in it.