The Association Between Elementary School Children’s Gender-Brilliance Stereotypes and Career Aspirations

• In Event: Developmental Roots and Predictors of Career Aspirations and Disparities

Abstract

More and more women are entering the workforce across the globe (World Economic Forum, 2017), but pronounced gender disparities in career outcomes still persist in certain domains, such as in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM). Along the pipeline, fewer women enroll in STEM programs, and even fewer women undertake professional roles in those fields (World Economic Forum, 2017, 2019). What causes these disparities?

Here, we investigate the possibility that these inequities have roots in development: Prevailing gender stereotypes may shape children’s aspirations, guiding them away from certain fields and toward others. In particular, stereotypes about brilliance and genius being male traits (e.g., Storage et al. 2020) may suppress girls’ aspirations to pursue fields where brilliance is viewed as the key to success (Leslie, Cimpian, et al., 2015), which include many STEM fields. Whereas prior work suggests that the gender-brilliance stereotype predicts differences in girls’ vs. boys’ interest in novel activities (Bian et al., 2017), here we examined for the first time the association between children’s gender-brilliance stereotype and their career aspirations. We expected that girls’, but not boys’, endorsement of the stereotype associating men (vs. women) with brilliance will negatively predict their aspirations for brilliance-oriented careers.

A secondary contribution of this work is that it examines children’s gender-brilliance stereotype (and its correlates) in a sample from Singapore, whereas all prior developmental work on this topic was conducted in the U.S. Examining cross-cultural generalizability is a key goal for developmental science (e.g., Wang & Kushnir, 2019).

342 Chinese Singaporean children aged 8 to 12 years participated (171 girls, Mage = 10.11 years). Children completed a gender-brilliance Implicit Association Test (IAT) previously created and validated by Storage et al. (2020) on a sample of U.S. children. To assess aspirations, we asked children an open-ended question: “What do you want to be after you grow up?” Out of the 342 children, 294 provided career-related responses. (The others answered “don’t know” or “not sure.”) The careers mentioned were then coded by a sample of 151 Singaporean adults with respect to whether they are generally perceived to require high-level intellectual ability. The average rating for each career served as an index of the extent to which each child’s aspirations were brilliance-oriented.

First, we found that Singaporean children, like U.S. children, exhibit a “brilliance = men” stereotype. Additionally, this stereotype was stronger in older children (Figure 1). Second, we found the predicted negative association between girls’ (vs. boys’) implicit stereotypes and their aspirations, but only among younger children (Figure 2). The more younger girls implicitly associated men with brilliance, the less they aspired to brilliance-oriented careers (e.g., scientist). However, this was not true for older children, suggesting some caution in interpreting this relationship.

This study provides evidence of a link between endorsement of the gender-brilliance stereotype and girls’ early career aspirations. Although this relationship was only present among younger children, the results are nevertheless consistent with a role for the “brilliance = men” stereotype in the process that diverts women away from many prestigious careers.

Authors

• Siqi Zhao, New York University
  Presenting Author

• Peipei Setoh, Nanyang Technological University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Daniel Storage, University of Denver
  Non-Presenting Author

• Andrei Cimpian, New York University
  Non-Presenting Author