Gender Stereotypes About the Roles of Effort and Ability in Math Achievement During Childhood

• In Event: Girls’ and Boys’ Attitudes and Beliefs about STEM: Sources, Development, and Relations to Achievement

Abstract

Whereas men’s intellectual achievements are often attributed to natural talent, women’s intellectual achievements are more often attributed to high levels of effort. The tendency to attribute women’s successes to effort, rather than ability, is particularly pronounced in male-dominated science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) fields (Swim & Sanna, 1996), diminishing women’s STEM interests (Smith et al., 2013). Like adults, children’s achievements in STEM domains are subject to stereotype-driven attributions: Both parents and teachers report that girls must try harder than boys to attain the same level of math performance (Frome & Eccles, 1998; Robinson-Cimpian et al., 2014). However, prior research has not examined whether children endorse these attributional stereotypes during elementary school, a critical time for the development of math attitudes and gender differences therein. The present work begins to address this gap by investigating children’s attributions of math achievement across the elementary school years.

155 6- to 11-year-olds (M = 8.74) completed a brief task designed to assess attributional gender stereotypes about mathematics. The sample was evenly split by gender and racially/ethnically diverse (53% were children of color). During the stereotype task, children were read four stories, each of which described an individual who performed well in one academic domain: either math or language arts (a female-stereotyped verbal subject was included to assess the specificity/generality of children’s effort attributions). Each story included attributional content: In two stories, the protagonist performed well because they were gifted in that domain (the ability condition), and in two stories, the protagonist performed well because they were hardworking (the effort condition). Stories did not provide any gender cues. Upon hearing each story, children were presented with photos of unfamiliar adults (2 women; 2 men) and asked to indicate the individual described in the story.

Results revealed a significant interaction between attribution condition and domain (p = .008), such that children were relatively more likely to identify women as achieving in math because of high levels of effort (see Figure 1). Conversely, children were relatively more likely to identify women as achieving in language arts because of high ability (Figure 1). Follow-up analyses indicated that these effects did not vary by age (p = .150), but did differ by gender (p = .033): Girls exhibited more gender-stereotypical responses than boys across domains (Figure 1).

These results suggest that, by the age 6, girls expect that women are more likely to succeed in math as a result of high levels of effort rather than mathematical ability, relative to men (Figure 1). Conversely, girls expect that women are relatively more likely to succeed in language arts as the result of greater verbal ability, rather than effort. Extrapolating from prior research on adults (Smith et al., 2013), this early emerging tendency to credit women’s math achievements to their exceptional efforts may be detrimental to girls’ math attitudes and motivation as early as the first years of formal schooling. This possibility will be directly addressed by ongoing research examining the relations between children’s attributional stereotypes and their math outcomes.

Authors

• Jillian Lauer, University of Cambridge
  Presenting Author

• Andrei Cimpian, New York University
  Non-Presenting Author