Scholar Lin Bian on the Early-Emerging Gender Stereotypes About Brilliance

 

Who is really smart? Would you assume men or women are more brilliant? Stereotypes regarding gender and brilliance are formed by the early elementary years, with most children assuming men are more brainy. Are you surprised? Many of the Bing staff at fall staff development day were when Dr. Lin Bian presented her research on gender stereotypes about intelligence.

 

Bian, a postdoctoral scholar working with Drs. Ellen Markman and Carol Dweck in the Department of Psychology at Stanford University, is studying gender stereotypes about high intellectual capabilities. At Bing, she continues this line of research with 5-year-olds. She also conducted studies looking at 4- to 5-year-old children’s understanding of nutrition, in collaboration with Markman, this year.

 

In Bian’s talk, “‘Who is really really smart?’ The early-emerging gender stereotypes about brilliance,” she provided a new perspective for understanding the current gender disparity in certain academic fields—not just those in science and technology, but also some in the humanities, such as philosophy. This gender gap may be shaped, in part, by the beliefs adopted by practitioners of different disciplines concerning what is required for success. Specifically, gender imbalances may be largest in disciplines that portray success as being a matter of intellectual “brilliance”—something that women are culturally stereotyped as possessing less of than men. In fact, one much-cited study published in the journal Science in 2015 by Sarah-Jane Leslie, Andrei Cimpian, Meredith Meyer and Edward Freeland found that women are underrepresented in fields that are thought of as requiring brilliance. In her talk, Bian focused on the developmental roots of this gender gap by looking at the acquisition of the gender stereotypes about brilliance and how these stereotypes affect girls’ participation in these fields.

 

Bian described two sets of predictions that she went on to test. First, she predicted that the stereotypes against women’s intelligence would begin to be assimilated in the early elementary school years, and second, these stereotypes would affect children’s motivation, leading girls to avoid activities portrayed as requiring “smarts.”

 

To test her first prediction, Bian administered a number of tasks to assess 5- to 7-year-old children’s beliefs about which gender is “really, really smart.” For example, the researchers told children a story about a “really, really smart person,” without providing any clues about the person’s gender. The children were then shown images of four people (two women and two men) and asked to choose the one that they thought the story was about. Bian found that, at the age of 5, boys’ and girls’ answers were very similar: Both boys and girls picked people of their own gender as being “really, really smart.” However, starting at age 6, girls became less likely than boys to do this: Girls picked females as “really, really smart” less often than boys picked males.

 

In another study, Bian and her colleagues examined whether these gender stereotypes affected children’s choice of activities. The researchers introduced two games to 6- and 7-year-olds. One game was described as being “only for kids 2018who are really, really smart” (brilliance game), the other as being “only for kids who try really, really hard” (dedication game). The researchers gauged the children’s interest in the two games and found that girls were less interested in the brilliance game (but not the dedication game) than boys. Their research also measured children’s endorsement of the “brilliance = men” stereotypes by telling them a story about a “really, really smart child,” as in the first studies. They found that girls’ interest in the brilliance game was lower if they endorsed the stereotype that brilliance is a male quality.

 

Based on her findings that the negative stereotypes about girls were not present at age 5, Bian predicted that 5-year-old girls would be as interested as their same-age male peers in the brilliance game. Her next study tested this by comparing 5- and 6-year-olds’ interest in the brilliance game. The results confirmed her prediction: The 5-year-old boys and girls were equally interested in the brilliance game, while 6-year-old girls were less interested than the boys.

 

Bian’s series of studies found that the negative stereotypes about women’s intelligence are formed by the early elementary school years. Once established, these negative stereotypes immediately influence the activities that girls choose to participate in, leading them to avoid activities perceived as requiring high intellectual abilities.

 

Looking forward, Bian is considering the sources of these stereotypes. She has already found children’s perception of which gender has high achievements in school to be an insignificant source, and she is looking into parents, teachers and peers as other possibilities. She is also investigating how to block the negative effects of these gender stereotypes on young children’s development. Future interventions may focus on providing role models, demonstrating gender equality and training teachers.