Stereotypes: We tend to think men are more ingenious than women
Of course we attribute the same outstanding abilities to women as we do to men. Or so we say. But the old gender stereotypes are still stuck in our heads.
Professorships, Nobel Prizes, top positions: For decades, the majority of them went to men. And even today, women are underrepresented in science and technology when it comes to prestigious posts and honours. A study in the "Journal of Experimental Social Psychology" has now investigated whether there could be a stereotype behind this: Do we associate "genius" more with men than with women? In other words, are we more likely to attribute outstanding abilities to men?
When asked directly about this, test subjects predominantly answered in the negative, reports the team of two female and two male psychologists. "If they do, then people claim that they associate women with brilliance. But the implicit mass tells a different story," says Tessa Charlesworth from Harvard University in a press release.
In order to find out about unconscious attitudes, the team used the so-called Implicit Association Test (IAT). The test subjects sorted terms and images on the computer under time pressure: they were asked to press the same key whenever either a term ("brilliant") or a certain type of image appeared - sometimes the image of a man, sometimes that of a woman. The logic behind this: The faster we respond, the easier the task is for us, and this suggests that the two concepts are closely linked in our minds.
Brilliance is often associated with men
With more than 3,600 test subjects from almost 80 countries, the group used this method to compare the unconscious associations between men and women and six characteristics. Compared with characteristics such as "creative" and "funny", the test subjects reacted more quickly to the combination of "brilliant" with a man (and not a woman). Only the trait "strong" was even more closely associated with the male gender. And this was true for male and female test subjects, for adults and children, as the research group writes: they all associated brilliance more closely with a man than with a woman, just as much as man and career or woman and family.
Such stereotypes and unconscious attitudes influence how we search for and process information - preferably that which confirms our preconceived ideas. And they develop very early on, as co-author Andrei Cimpian observed together with other colleagues in 2017: at the age of five, children did not yet differentiate between boys and girls when it came to the characteristic "very smart". However, this changed at the age of six: at this age, girls were less likely to attribute the trait to their own gender than boys were to attribute it to themselves. And at this time, girls also began to avoid activities that were supposedly only suitable for "very smart" children. From this, Cimpian and his team concluded that the changed concept had a direct impact on interests. The current study suggests that this continues into adulthood, as the authors conclude: "The implicit association keeps women away from prestigious professions."
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