What's Wrong with Stereotypes?

1. Opposition to Stereotyping

I keep hearing that “stereotyping” is bad, and that it’s good to undermine stereotypes. For instance, if you have a TV show with a brilliant surgeon, you should make them a woman. Or black. Or, best of all, a black woman. Because that will defy stereotypes and thereby make the world a better place.

If you make a picture of some business people in a meeting, you have to make sure that it does not reflect what most business meetings actually look like; rather, you should gender balance it and make sure to have three different races represented (see above photo).

If someone tells a joke that relies on stereotypes about a group, that is “offensive” and hence evil. I guess because it reinforces the stereotypes? Or maybe it’s just evil to rely on a stereotype for anything.

Back when James Damore was fired from Google, it was partly because he cited research to the effect that women tend to be higher than men in the traits of “agreeableness” and “neuroticism” from the 5-factor model of personality. In doing so, he was reinforcing stereotypes, which all decent people know to be evil. If a statement sounds like a stereotype, that alone is enough to categorically reject it.

Most of the people who believe this have a predictable political orientation, and so you can usually count on a certain amount of hypocrisy. Thus, certain stereotypes are fine. You can stereotype white men as privileged oppressors, you can stereotype Republicans as uneducated, etc. It’s all a matter of stereotyping the right group in the right way. As long as your stereotype reinforces your political side, it’s cool.

But I digress. My question: what exactly is supposed to be wrong with stereotypes? Why not use and reinforce them?

2. Problems with Stereotypes

A. What are stereotypes?

First, what is a stereotype? Usually, people are talking about stereotypes about groups of people (e.g., women, black people, doctors). (I guess you could also have “stereotypes” about any class of object, but we don’t care about non-human objects.) As far as I can tell, a “stereotype” is just a widely shared belief about what a certain class of people tend to be like.

Aside: Maybe there are a few other conditions, such as: it can’t be something definitional, it has to differentiate the group from other groups, and it should