Sexualized Gender Stereotypes Predict Girls’ Academic Self-Efficacy and Motivation Across Middle School

• In Event: 3-144 - Sexualization in Childhood and Early Adolescence: Associations with Peer Relationships, Academics, and Body Image

Integrative Statement

The ubiquitous culture of sexualization (APA, 2007) fosters commonly-held sexualized gender stereotypes (SGS). These stereotypes include the belief that girls should singularly prioritize their sexually objectified attractiveness for the attention and approval of boys (e.g., Nelson & Brown, 2018; Ward, 2002). However, by elementary school, boys and girls perceive girls’ sexualized attractiveness to be incompatible with intelligence and competence (Starr & Ferguson, 2012; Stone et al., 2015). Thus, when girls prioritize sexually objectified attractiveness, they appear to deprioritize conflicting traits like intelligence (McKenney & Bigler, 2014); this conflict between a desired sexualized appearance and intelligence may exert downward pressures on girls’ future academic motivation and beliefs. These pressures may be especially strong for girls who perceive themselves to be highly typical for their gender, as these stereotypes may be especially self-relevant for them. Unfortunately, as most research has been cross-sectional, it is unclear whether endorsing SGS that are antithetical to academic success leads to reductions in academic motivation over time, or whether girls who have low academic motivation and self-efficacy lean into stereotypes that deemphasize academic success. In the current two-year study, it was hypothesized that higher SGS endorsement in seventh grade would predict lower motivation to learn new material (i.e., a diminished mastery goal orientation) and lower perceptions of their own academic ability (i.e., lower academic self-efficacy) in eighth grade, even after controlling for actual academic ability and earlier academic attitudes, and that the links would be strongest for girls who perceive themselves to be highly typical for their gender. It was predicted that these associations would not be present for boys. Alternative models were tested to examine whether stereotype endorsement contributes to later academic motivation and self-efficacy to a greater degree than the inverse.

The study included 142 middle school students (99 girls, 43 boys) from 4 public middle schools, collected while participants were in seventh grade and then again in eighth grade (MageT1 = 12.4 yrs, SD = .57). The sample was ethnically diverse: almost half of the participants identified as White (45%), and 21% reported being Latinx, 19% Black/African American, and 14% multiracial (most of whom identified as Black/White and Latina/White). Participants completed measures of their sexualized gender stereotypes (based on Ward, 2002; Jewell et al., 2015), gender typicality (Egan & Perry, 2001), academic self-efficacy and mastery orientation (Patterns of Adaptive Learning Scales; Midgley et al., 2000). Academic abilities were assessed with grade-normed achievement test in math and reading. Pubertal status and age were included as control variables.

Analyses indicated that, as predicted, early adolescents girls’ (but not boys’) endorsement of sexualized gender stereotypes in seventh grade predicted their academic self-efficacy (B = -.29) and mastery orientation (B = -.23) in eighth grade, controlling for age, pubertal status, academic ability, and earlier levels of academic attitudes. Although alternative models found that earlier self-efficacy did predict later sexualized gender stereotypes (B = -.25), the relationship between stereotypes predicting later academic attitudes was more robust and explained twice as much variance as the inverse.

Author

• Christia Spears Brown, University of Kentucky
  Presenting Author