Young girls less likely to think they’re smart, study finds
A recently published study has examined gender stereotypes relating to intelligence, or more accurately, perceived intelligence, and has found that young girls begin to doubt their gender’s capabilities by age six.
The report, published in ScienceMagazine, showed that five-year-old children “seemed not to differentiate between boys and girls in expectations of ‘really, really smart’”. However, by age six, girls were more likely to designate boys as “really, really smart”, and showed less interest in games presented to them as one for the “really, really smart.”
How did the researchers carry out their work? There were several experiments carried out with children of different ages:
- The first involved 96 children who were each told a story about a person who was “really, really smart”, but were not told this person’s gender. The kids were then shown pictures of four adults – two men, two women – and were asked to guess who the story was about.
- These same 96 children were also shown the adults in pairs – two men; two women; one man and one woman – and were instructed to choose which of the two was the “really, really smart” person.
- This first group also participated in an association game involving images of objects such as hammers, and words like smart, and asked to assign them to pictures of men and women.
Similar experiments were carried out with six- and seven-year-olds, and the results showed that “perceptions of brilliance” go through a fairly drastic change. The five-year-olds were likely to associate brilliance with their own gender on roughly the same level, but the older girls were significantly less likely to assign brilliance to their own gender than were the boys.
A second set of tasks were carried out by another group of children (144 of them), who rated the intelligence of adults and children. The results remained largely unchanged with this set.
The researchers (Lian Bian, Sarah-Jane Leslie, and Andrei Cimpian) were motivated by the fact that “common stereotypes associate high-level intellectual ability (brilliance, genius, etc.) with men more than women.” They theorise that stereotypes such as these “discourage women’s pursuit of many prestigious careers” in fields such as physics and philosophy.
In a peer-review section of the Science Magazine, Physician Nancy Lutwak called the study “eye-opening and distressing” as it “demonstrates that by age six girls are convinced brilliance is a male quality.” Lutwak cites numbers showing that despite women holding close to 50 per cent of the jobs in the US economy, participation of women in the STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Maths) fields is less than 25 per cent.
Do you have young girls in your family? Have you noticed a lack of interest in areas assigned to “brilliance”?
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