What’s your least favourite female stereotype?

If there’s one thing we know here at What I See HQ, it’s that you can’t put people in boxes. We shut our web designer in a cupboard once, and he only went and quit on us.

Only joking. What we’re really talking about is the expectation of society – something that is so often really reductive when it comes to people.

One of the interesting questions at our ambassador Q&A during our launch party was one asked by Ella Taylor, a 22-year-old female mathematician: ‘What am I supposed to respond when people take one look at me and say: “You don’t look like a mathematician?”’

Professor Frances Ashcroft, a Professor of Physiology at the University of Oxford, and Professor Dame Athene Donald, Professor of Experimental Physics at the University of Cambridge, had both had similar experiences. Athene, who talks about the struggles she's faced as a woman in science in her Features video, said the riposte could be: ‘What should a mathematician look like?’ – in fact, it gave her so much food for thought that she blogged about it afterwards. And just today, she wrote a Guardian piece about our "perception that subjects such as physics and maths aren't really subjects fit for girls."

Yesterday, Laura Bates of the Everyday Sexism Project wrote about what happened when they asked women to tweet their experiences of STEM careers. There were many encouraging responses, but unfortunately plenty more negative ones than positive – many of which revolved around the poorly unimaginative ‘what’s a pretty young thing like you doing science for’ trope.

All of this exemplifies the danger of stereotypes. Women remain in the minority in many scientific fields – could this be not only the cause for negative comments, but also the result of them? Is this stereotyping putting women off applying for jobs in which they’d be a small minority, and therefore the potential victim of comments such as ‘Whoa, what are you doing here?’

With this in mind, we came up with today’s WISPchat topic: which gender stereotype grinds your gears the most? Is it that ‘all girls love pink, shopping and makeup’? The ‘crazy ex-girlfriend’ model as popularised by Glenn Close in Fatal Attraction?  The very many propagated by the advertising and marketing industries? Or, that old favourite, ‘a woman belongs in the kitchen’?

Tune in at 2pm using the hashtag #WISPchat and let us know!