The Development of Girls’ Reluctance to Publicize Their Own Outstanding Performance

• In Event: Girls in STEM: Exploring the Developmental Origins of the Gender Gap in Science

Abstract

Women now own half of all U.S. businesses and hold half of all U.S. faculty positions, but gender disparities are still substantial among those at the very top (e.g., women represent only 6.6% of Fortune 500 company CEOs and 27% of tenured faculty members; Finkelstein et al., 2016; Forbes, 2019). Similarly, developmental research shows that girls’ average academic performance is at similar or higher levels when compared to that of boys, but girls are still substantially underrepresented among very top performers (Hyde & Mertz, 2009; Machin & Pekkarinen, 2008; O’Dea et al., 2018).

Here we examined one factor that might contribute to gender disparities at the very top – the development of gender differences in children’s willingness to share and publicize their own outstanding performance. If females are less willing than males to publicize outstanding achievements, they may disassociate themselves from top performance or positions that others may know about. We asked 122 elementary-age children (62 female; Mage = 9.86 years) and 100 adults (46 female) to answer as many science questions as they wished (up to five). Between each question, participants were given feedback about their relative performance; those randomly assigned to the Top condition were told that they were at the 80th percentile after the first question, whereas those assigned to the Average condition were told they were at the 40th percentile. Participants were told that they could increase their percentile by 5% by trying each subsequent question (feedback was controlled such that participants always answered the questions correctly and visual representations of percentiles were provided to children). Then, participants’ name and final percentile score were displayed together on the screen (Top: 80%-100%; Average: 40%-60%). Adult participants were then asked if they would like to add their name and score to a university-wide public database and child participants were asked if they would like to share their score with their school peers, best friend, and parents, respectively.

Both adults and children chose to complete most of the questions (adults: M = 4.61; children: M = 4.96); willingness to persist did not vary by gender or condition (ps > .8). Among both adults and children, however, male participants were significantly more likely to publicize their top than average performance, whereas female participants were not (interaction between gender and condition, for adults, p = .046, and children, p = .034; Figure 1). Further, as shown in Figure 2, among children, boys were particularly more likely to share top than average performance with peers or best friends but shared across both conditions with parents, whereas girls were particularly unlikely to share their top performance with best friends.

These data suggest that, by at least middle childhood, girls are less likely to publicly accentuate their top achievements. This work thus sheds new light on how gender gaps develop among those at the very top and have broader implications for combating gender stereotypes and increasing female representation.

Authors

• Michelle Wang, New York University
  Presenting Author

• Sarah-Jane Leslie, Princeton University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Marjorie Rhodes, New York University
  Non-Presenting Author