When West Meets East And Man Meets Woman

This study investigates the correlation among gender role attitudes, mathematic performance and academic emotions in different cultural context. As both a collectivistic and masculine-oriented society, China's traditional gender role attitudes are continuously challenged with the trend of globalization, western culture and the increasing domestic voice of women for equality. Will such change influence the two stereotyped areas: mathematics and emotion? With this interest, the author suggests to investigate: 1) Do culture and gender still influence gender role attitudes, mathematic performance and academic emotions? 2) Do correlations exist among these three factors? These questions are answered by this quantitative study by collecting data from a specially-designed questionnaire. The questionnaire contained three measurements: Items from the Stereotypical Sex-Role Inventory (SSRI) were employed to measure gender role attitudes; National College Entrance Examination (NCEE) and Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) were employed to measure math ability and items from the Academic Emotion Questionnaire—Mathematics (AEQ-M) were used to assess the emotional experience of men and women. Results show that compared with their US counterparts, Chinese students hold more traditional gender role attitudes, experience less intense feelings and have better mathematic performance; Men, in comparison with women, are more traditional in gender role attitudes. It is also found that mathematic performance is related with gender role attitudes, which may be explained by the theory of arousal effect of gender stereotypes threat. Overall, gender differences in all three measurments are not very salient, showing an equalizing trend. Between-group differences are also assessed among Chinese male students, Chinese female students, US male students and US female students. The main finding of this study is that cultural and gender really makes difference in people's gender-related attitudes but gender does not affect academic performance obviously.