Who wrote this text?

Women are under-represented in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Math) (UNESCO 2017), as they are deemed as less competent than men (i.e., gender-science stereotype). We aimed at testing whether some well-known gender stereotypes –as ‘’dumb blonde’’ (i.e., blond individuals, especially women, are considered as more dumb or naive)- could explicitly affect the gender-science stereotype, and if and how they interact. To this aim we manipulated pictures of (a) a woman (Exp.1) and (b) a man (Exp.2), by modifying (i) hair-colour (brown, black, blond); (ii) hair-length (long, short) (iii) make-up (Exp.1: none, light or heavy make-up, as combined with (i) or beard (Exp.2: no beard, unshaved or bearded), (iv) glasses (present, absent). In this way we obtained 36 pictures for each Experiment (3x3x2x2), which were presented twice, once associated with an abstract and once with a novel. Participants (n = 164) are requested to evaluate, on a 10 points Likert scale, the level of probability of the authorship. Preliminary results (with a repeated measures ANOVA) show that the authorship of the scientific abstract is associated with a lower likelihood to women wearing heavier make-up and blond hair, no matter if long or short, while no effect has been found for men.