Children Associate Brilliance with Computer Science, not Biology: Investigating the Early-Emerging Field-Specific Beliefs about Brilliance

• In Event: New Perspectives on the STEM Gender Disparities: Children’s Interlocking Beliefs about Fields and Social Groups

Abstract

Women are generally underrepresented in the STEM domain, yet the gender gap is more dramatic in some STEM fields (e.g., computer science) than in others (e.g., biology). A similar variation appears in the non-STEM domain: women are well represented in psychology, but not in music composition. A potentially powerful contributor to this variation is the extent to which the field emphasizes the importance of brilliance for success (Leslie, Cimpian et al., 2015). Because women are stereotyped as lacking intellectual ability (Bian et al., 2017), fields that are associated with high intellectual talents may discourage women’s participation (Bian et al., 2018). The present work took a developmental approach to investigate early associations between academic fields and brilliance. Of secondary interest, we explored the consequences of these field-specific beliefs on children’s motivation.
In Study 1, five to ten-year-olds (N = 144) heard a story about a “really smart” person. Then, we asked children to guess if the person worked in computer science, biology, psychology or music composition. With age, children became significantly more likely to believe the “really smart” person was a computer scientist (B = 0.36, p = .007), but less likely to think this person was a biologist (B = -0.18, p = .090), psychologist (B = -0.21, p = .049), or music composer (B = -0.50, p = .002) (Figure 1). Perceiving a field as requiring brilliance influenced children’s motivation: girls were less interested in becoming a computer scientist than boys at age 8.3, whereas boys and girls were equally interested in biology across ages.
Study 2 (N = 76, planned N = 144) aimed to replicate these findings with a richer set of measures, focusing on the two STEM fields—biology and computer science. Participants were introduced to the two fields and their intelligence beliefs about each field were measured using three tasks. In Task 1 children heard a story about a job that requires high intelligence and indicated whether it is a job in computer science or biology. In Task 2, participants were asked to evaluate statements reflecting beliefs about each field (e.g., “To work in computer science, you have to be really, really smart”). In Task 3, participants completed a word choice task where participants selected a word that they thought would be most important to do well in each field. Responses to these three tasks were standardized and averaged to create a composite score for each field. Replicating Study 1, children with age reported a greater association of brilliance with computer science than biology (Figure 2). We also included three questions to assess children’s motivation and found a similar influence of these brilliance beliefs on children’s motivation: relative to boys, girls with age became less interested in computer science, but they became more interested in biology.
Overall, our findings provide converging evidence that children develop distinct associations between brilliance and fields from a young age, which may be a mechanism perpetuating women’s underrepresentation in certain disciplines such as computer science.

Authors

• Molly Paige Tallberg, University of Chicago
  Presenting Author

• Lin Bian, University of Chicago