Last week I wrote about "Stereotype Threat" (ST) and in this blog post I'm going to identify the values that are the most important to me and how I can use these to combat ST. Claude M. Steele, one of the leading experts on how ST impacts minority student academic performance, argues that one of the best ways to combat ST is through affirmation. He developed the "self-affirmational" process in the 1980s, which helps reduce threats to our self-image by stepping back and affirming a value that is important to our self-concept.

An example that Steele uses is that when smokers are told that smoking will lead to negative health outcomes. If someone continues to smoke, they may believe that others will evaluate that activity negatively and this will impact the smoker's self-image. However, if the smoker affirms a value in a domain completely unrelated to smoking but a value that is important to his or her "self-concept", Steele claims that someone can re-establish self-integrity. He has said that these self-affirmations also work to combat ST, particularly with African-American students and female students in math and science classes.

Dev Bootcamp challenged us to explore our own values, asking "When you think of the times in your life where you’ve been the happiest, the proudest, or the most satisfied, which values come to mind?" The values I care the most about are:

• Empathy: Being kind; everyone I meet is fighting their own battle
• Empowerment: Learning to trust and connect with one's inner compass
• Grit: Resilience; learning to move through tough periods
• Discipline: Creating positive environments that build energy and health; honoring boundaries
• Creativity: Being an idea machine. To have more good ideas, need to have more ideas overall; even the bad ones

The next Dev Bootcamp prompt was the following: "What was the last topic that someone asked for your advice on? Did it relate to any of the values you found important?" A lot of people call me to ask about career advice. Often they are considering going into consulting or private equity and want to know about my experiences in the industry. The two values that always comes up for me during these conversations are empathy and empowerment. I will never know the right answer for someone else's career, and I'm always careful to avoid saying "you should" because I don't know what they should do in the situation. There are a lot of right paths, and in those situations I spent most of my time explaining what my experiences were and trying to figure out which values are the most important to them and see if the career would be a good fit for that or not.

As an aside, it feels strange for me to talk about my values so openly in a public forum. Mostly because, these have been my core values for years and spend time checking in on these values before I make any major decision. Publishing these in a public forum feels like they are now open to critique. I'm not looking to change my core value set.

I suspect there will be many instances when stereotype threat will creep up in Dev Bootcamp. Especially given that we only have four women in a cohort of 35+. I'm used to being in situations where I am technically "diversity," especially for my gender. Employing grit and empathy when I'm faced with a unpleasant situation works nearly every time.