TY - JOUR
T1 - Adults and children implicitly associate brilliance with men more than women
AU - Storage, Daniel
AU - Charlesworth, Tessa E.S.
AU - Banaji, Mahzarin R.
AU - Cimpian, Andrei
N1 - Funding Information:
We are grateful to our participants, including the Urbana-Champaign and New York families who participated. We would also like to thank the research assistants from the Cognitive Development Labs at the University of Illinois and New York University for their help with data collection. The members of the Cognitive Development Lab at New York University provided helpful feedback on a previous draft of this manuscript. This research was supported by National Science Foundation grants BCS-1530669 and BCS-1733897 awarded to Andrei Cimpian and the Dean's Competitive Fund for Promising Scholarship from Harvard University to Mahzarin R. Banaji.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2020 Elsevier Inc.
Copyright:
Copyright 2020 Elsevier B.V., All rights reserved.
PY - 2020/9
Y1 - 2020/9
N2 - Women are underrepresented in careers where success is perceived to depend on high levels of intellectual ability (e.g., brilliance, genius), including those in science and technology. This phenomenon may be due in part to a gender-brilliance stereotype that portrays men as more brilliant than women. Here, we offer the first investigation of whether people implicitly associate brilliance with men more than women. Implicit measures are absent from prior research on the gender-brilliance stereotype, despite having the potential to contribute unique information about the prevalence of this stereotype. Across 5 studies (N = 3618) with 17 Implicit Association Tests using 6 distinct comparison traits (e.g., creative, funny), we found consistent evidence for an implicit gender-brilliance stereotype favoring men. Indeed, for 5 out of 6 comparison traits (even the male-typed trait funny), male was associated with brilliant and female with the comparison trait. Only a physical trait (strong) showed a stronger association with male than brilliant did; none of the psychological traits used as comparisons rivaled brilliant in their association to male. Evidence for the implicit gender-brilliance stereotype was consistently observed whether the male and female targets were represented with verbal labels or pictures, and whether the pictures depicted White or Black targets. Moreover, the results were robust in both men and women, children and adults, across different regions of the U.S. as well as internationally. This pervasive implicit association of brilliance with men is likely to hold women back in careers perceived to require brilliance.
AB - Women are underrepresented in careers where success is perceived to depend on high levels of intellectual ability (e.g., brilliance, genius), including those in science and technology. This phenomenon may be due in part to a gender-brilliance stereotype that portrays men as more brilliant than women. Here, we offer the first investigation of whether people implicitly associate brilliance with men more than women. Implicit measures are absent from prior research on the gender-brilliance stereotype, despite having the potential to contribute unique information about the prevalence of this stereotype. Across 5 studies (N = 3618) with 17 Implicit Association Tests using 6 distinct comparison traits (e.g., creative, funny), we found consistent evidence for an implicit gender-brilliance stereotype favoring men. Indeed, for 5 out of 6 comparison traits (even the male-typed trait funny), male was associated with brilliant and female with the comparison trait. Only a physical trait (strong) showed a stronger association with male than brilliant did; none of the psychological traits used as comparisons rivaled brilliant in their association to male. Evidence for the implicit gender-brilliance stereotype was consistently observed whether the male and female targets were represented with verbal labels or pictures, and whether the pictures depicted White or Black targets. Moreover, the results were robust in both men and women, children and adults, across different regions of the U.S. as well as internationally. This pervasive implicit association of brilliance with men is likely to hold women back in careers perceived to require brilliance.
KW - Brilliance
KW - Gender
KW - Implicit Association Test
KW - Stereotypes
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U2 - 10.1016/j.jesp.2020.104020
DO - 10.1016/j.jesp.2020.104020
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85087399203
VL - 90
JO - Journal of Experimental Social Psychology
JF - Journal of Experimental Social Psychology
SN - 0022-1031
M1 - 104020
ER -