Men are considered "brilliant" more often than women, according to a new study measuring global perceptions of gender. The work concludes that these stereotyped views exemplify implicit bias, revealing automatic associations that people cannot or at least cannot report when asked directly. The research was conducted by scientists from New York University, the University of Denver and Harvard University.
“Stereotypes that portray brilliance as a masculine trait are likely to deter women from a wide range of prestigious careers,” notes Daniel Storage, an assistant professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Denver and the lead author of the study.
“Understanding the prevalence and magnitude of this gender stereotype may aid future efforts to increase gender equality in career outcomes,” added Andrei Cimpian, an associate professor in NYU's Department of Psychology and the paper's lead author.
Previous work by Cimpian and his colleagues has suggested that women are underrepresented in careers where success is viewed as dependent on a high level of intellectual ability (e.g., genius), including those in science and technology.
Less understood are the factors that explain this phenomenon. To address this, the study examined the potential impact of stereotypes. For example, perhaps the qualities of genius in people's minds are more associated with men than with women – and as a result, women are less encouraged to follow these fields – or the atmosphere of these fields is less welcome for women.
Accurately measuring stereotyping is challenging, however. People are often reluctant to admit they have stereotypes, so a direct question about these beliefs is unlikely to be an accurate measure of whether they subscribe to the idea that brilliance is more common in men than women.
To overcome this methodological obstacle, the researchers adopted a test aimed at indirectly measuring stereotyping. The goal here is to capture implicit stereotypes – or the automatic associations that come to mind between certain traits (e.g. genius) and certain groups (e.g. men). This is in contrast to explicit stereotyping, in which we knowingly assign characteristics to groups of people.
The team used a long-standing tool called the Implicit Association Test (IAT), which measures the degree of overlap between concepts (e.g., brilliant and masculine) without explicitly asking subjects whether or not they hold stereotypical views.
The IAT is essentially an accelerated sorting task. In the study, participants saw a series of stimuli (such as a picture of a woman or the word "brilliant") on a computer screen and were asked to sort them into two categories by pressing the E or I keys on their keyboards. to press . For example, in some studies, participants were asked to press E when they saw a stimulus related to the masculine category or the brilliant trait. In other trials, the sorting rule was different. For example, the gender categories were swapped so that participants had to press E when they saw a stimulus related to the category feminine or the trait brilliant.
The logic of the IAT, the authors explain, is this:If brilliant is associated more with masculine than feminine in people's minds, participants are more likely to sort the stimuli when brilliant and masculine are combined with the same response key — because the stereotype these two concepts seem to “go together” – than when brilliant and feminine are paired.
In a series of five studies involving American women and men, American girls and boys (ages 9 and 10), and women and men from 78 other countries, the researchers found consistent evidence for an implicit stereotype that brilliantly associates with men more than with women. The magnitude of this stereotype was also striking – for example, it was comparable in strength to the implicit stereotype that men more than women associate with careers (and women more than men with family), identified in previous work.
The team also probed explicit stereotypes and asked the subjects directly whether they believed that men are more brilliant than women. Contrary to the implicit stereotyping measures, subjects reported disagreeing with this idea — and, in one study, explicitly associating the quality of "super slim" with women more than with men. The finding is consistent with previous studies showing that people are unlikely to admit stereotyping, reinforcing the importance of measuring such perceptions by more subtle means.
Tessa Charlesworth, a doctoral student at Harvard University and a co-author of the paper, notes that “one particularly exciting finding from this work is that people at least explicitly say they associate women with bri-alliance. But implicit measurements reveal a different story about the more automatic gender stereotypes that come to mind when you think of genius. ‘
