The statement “girls are as good as boys at math” appears to express that girls and boys are equally skilled, but research indicates that such subject-complement statements subtly imply that the group in the complement position (boys) is superior. Even when people hold baseline stereotypes about the domain in question, their judgments of ability can still be swayed by reading such a statement. In three experiments, we investigated the effects of explicit awareness of this kind of syntax in regard to math ability and likelihood of being a terrorist. Participants read a passage describing a large-scale study about either math or terrorism that contained such subject-complement statements and then judged either which gender (girls or boys) was more skilled at math or which religious group (Christians or Muslims) was more likely to be terrorists. By replicating and extending previous work, we found that those who do not explicitly attend to the statements containing subject-complement syntax make judgments in line with the implied biases. Those who do explicitly attend to the statements either show a bias in the opposite direction or none at all, perhaps because they consciously resist the subtle biases. Our results suggest that effects of these statements on judgments of ability and disposition are not as pervasive as previously assumed.