Change your posture. Body language affects not only how others see us, but also it appears to change how we see ourselves.

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Imagine you are applying for the dream job of your life. Youve got five minutes to explain to two interviewers why they should pick you over 100 other smartly dressed candidates. As you make your presentation, the interviewers stare at you unblinkingly like a bank teller with a lobotomy.

No expression. No indication of interest. They simply watch as you pour out your pitch.

Harvard social psychologist Amy Cuddy designed this nightmarish torture session to provoke profound anxiety. She wanted subjects to be tested to their social-apprehension limits in order to test a surprisingly simple tool you and I can use when the pressure is on. So stay tuned.

Its a terrible irony that when it matters most, we often do our worst. More often than not, our emotions undermine our performance in the most crucial moments of our lives.

Stress and fear wiggle their way up through all our attempts to conceal them and reveal our feelings in predictable ways that others can discern. These little gestures telegraph feelings of weakness and damage our credibility.

Similarly, those who feel powerful behave markedly differently as well. For example, I watched one fascinating video study of nonverbal behavior on the U.S. Senate and House floors. When the video was sped up, you could immediately spot the powerful. They would stand still like a queen bee in a hive while clouds of underlings scurried about them, touching, bobbing and bowing frantically. We telegraph our feelings of both power and powerlessness all the time, and those little messages either bolster or weaken our influence.

Thats why Cuddys research is so important. Where many before her have offered advice about what to do with your body during a presentation, Cuddy wanted to test whether a remarkably modest intervention just prior to the stressful session would improve performance.

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Insights from the Behavioral Science Guy: Next time you feel nervous, assume this position

With everyone from the federal government to corporate America working to encourage more women to pursue careers in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) fields, you would think the doors would be wide open to women of all backgrounds. A new study from Columbia Business School shows that this could not be further from the truth and that gender bias among hiring managers in STEM fields is extraordinarily prevalent.

"How Stereotypes Impair Women's Careers in Science," written by Ernesto Reuben, assistant professor of management at Columbia Business School, and recently published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, reveals the underlying biases of hiring managers, and also demonstrates the cost of discrimination.

"Studies that seek to answer why there are more men than women in STEM fields typically focus on women's interests and choices," said Professor Reuben. "This may be important, but our experiments show that another culprit of this phenomenon is that hiring managers possess an extraordinary level of gender bias when making decisions and filling positions, often times choosing the less qualified male over a superiorly qualified female."

In an experiment in which participants were hired to perform a mathematical task, both male and female managers were twice as likely to hire a man than a woman -- even when the managers had no information beyond a candidate's appearance and, therefore, gender.

Dr. Reuben continued: "The end result is not only a less diverse workforce and a male-dominated STEM field, but also a detriment to these companies for hiring the less-skilled person for the job."

The study is co-authored by the Kellogg School of Management's Paola Sapienza and the Booth School of Business's Luigi Zingales, was recently published in PNAS.

The Field Study

To test the biases of hiring managers, Reuben and his research partners designed an experiment in which about 150 participants, in the role of job candidates, would be hired to perform a math assignment: correctly summing as many sets of four two-digit numbers as possible over a period of four minutes. Previous studies have shown that this type of arithmetic task is performed equally well by men and women. All of the candidates completed the task and were given their scores. In some versions of the experiment, the candidates were allowed to tell the managers how well they had performed, while in others their test results were not revealed.

Close to 200 other subjects, in the role of hiring managers, decided whether to hire a particular candidate to perform the task. The hiring managers also completed computer-based behavioral testing that indicated the degree to which they held stereotypes about the performance of men and women in science and math.

The Results

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New research proves gender bias extraordinarily prevalent in science, technology, engineering and math fields