Messages about brilliance undermine girls' interest in educational and professional opportunities
How to encourage girls' interest in tech — Newsletter No.30
When we highlighted the research that girls stopped believing they are brilliant at the age of six, we got so many reactions from you. This week’s research is about the consequences of that perception.
Research community has already showed that beliefs and messages about the ability needed for success have a causal influence on the diversity of a field (Field-specific Ability Beliefs (FAB)).
But, this is the first research to investigate environmental beliefs about exceptional ability, which members of many fields believe is necessary for success.
6 different experiments - 6 same conclusions
Six experiments were conducted and all of them suggested that messages about the importance of brilliance to success undermine women’s interest.
This causal effect emerged across a variety of contexts (internships, degree programs in STEM and in the social sciences and humanities, and jobs), in two participant populations (college students and Mechanical Turk adults), in participants’ responses to rating scales and open-ended prompts, and regardless of the specific wording used to convey the emphasis on brilliance.
Moreover, the results provided clues about the psychological processes that may explain the effect of these messages:
Women were less sure of success in brilliance-oriented settings and believed they were dissimilar to the type of person who commonly works in these settings.
In turn, these judgments predicted feelings of stress and anxiety, as well as a diminished sense of belonging.
Why women opt out?
There are two main reasons why women steer away from professional and educational opportunities which are tied to expectations of brilliance:
Women may perceive themselves to be dissimilar to the people in fields where brilliance is valued.
According to self-to-prototype matching theory, many important life choices (e.g., about which careers to pursue) are informed by a comparison between the self and the prototypical person in the context being considered. Given that the cultural prototype of the “brilliant person” excludes women, they are likely to perceive a mismatch with the members of brilliance-oriented fields.
This mismatch might lead women to be apprehensive about joining such fields; it might also raise concerns about belonging. Anxiety and lack of belonging could ultimately undermine women’s interest
Just as comparisons between the self and the prototypical person in a field can influence interest, so can judgments about whether one’s group is likely to be welcome and valued in a field. This is the stereotype threat, we wrote about previously.
Messages about the importance of brilliance may act as a situational cue to stereotype threat—the threat of being judged through the lens of a negative stereotype about one’s group.
As with the prototype matching mechanism, the threat of being stereotyped might give rise to feelings of anxiety and of not belonging, which might in turn lower women’s interest.
What can we do?
This is why this newsletter exists - to help parents understand challenges girls have when choosing a career, and more precisely perceiving technology. If we have to summarize, it would be two things:
1) Be supportive and help them build a growth mindset.
2) Introduce them to technology from an early age, and connect it with her interests.
You have bunch of suggestions to do so in our previous editions, and new ones will be in your inbox next week!
Hey, thanks for writing this. I had no idea it was as early as age 6. I definitely relate to what you're saying - I started a new job recently and in certain settings, I feel intimidated by people e.g. actuaries and that my skills weren't as good as theirs. Thank you.