Gender stereotypes live on: Research published in the journal Science found that girls starting at the age of 6 are less likely than boys of the same age to believe that girls are “really, really smart.”
Four studies — done by Lin Bian of the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign, Sarah-Jane Leslie of Princeton University and Andrei Cimpian of New York University — looked at children from ages 5 to 7 to understand when girls start to believe this about members of their own gender — even though they know that girls get better grades in school. This research builds on earlier work bearing out the phenomenon, including a 2015 study, led by Leslie, showing that the stereotype that women are not naturally “brilliant” like men could explain their underrepresentation in academia.
The Science article describing the research, titled “Gender stereotypes about intellectual ability emerge early and influence children’s interests,” says that girls at age 6 begin to avoid certain activities that they believe are only for the “really, really smart” children — boys.
The results suggest that children’s ideas about brilliance exhibit rapid changes over the period from ages 5 to 7. At 5, boys and girls associated brilliance with their own gender to a similar extent. … Despite this strong tendency to view one’s gender in a positive light, girls aged 6 and 7 were significantly less likely than boys to associate brilliance with their own gender. Thus, the “brilliance = males” stereotype may be familiar to, and endorsed by, children as young as 6. The stereotype associating females with being nice seems to follow a similar developmental trajectory.
The researchers also found that children’s beliefs about gender and brilliance shaped their interests, with girls at the age of 6 starting to choose games not considered to be for the really smart kids. They also found that the difference in boys’ vs. girls’ interest in the brilliance games was specifically determined “by their perceptions about brilliance, pinpointing these stereotyped perceptions (rather than modesty) as the underlying mechanism.” They concluded that the stereotype that boys are brilliant and girls aren’t — which is common in American society — may cause girls to narrow the careers they decide to pursue later in life.
In part of the research, children listened to a story about a “really, really smart” person and were asked to guess which of four adults — two men and two women – was the main character. Boys and girls ages 5 viewed their own gender positively but by 6, girls were much less likely than boys to link brilliance with their gender — and the differences were largely similar across socioeconomic and racial-ethnic backgrounds.
In a piece in The New York Times, two of the researchers, Cimpian and Leslie, wrote this:
What is to be done? Research provides some clues. The psychologist Carol Dweck has written that emphasizing the importance of learning and effort – rather than just innate ability – for success in any career might buffer girls against these stereotypes. The relevant stereotypes, already in place at the age of 6, seem to fixate on who is supposed to have innate ability. If innate ability is seen as secondary, then the power of these stereotypes is diminished. Other research indicates that providing girls with successful role models might similarly “inoculate” them, boosting their motivation and protecting them from the idea that they are not intellectually competitive. One study even suggested that witnessing a more equal distribution of household chores could help balance the career aspirations of boys and girls.
— The Washington Post
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