Girls believe boys are smarter
Why do girls as young as six believe boys are smarter?
Hattie Garlick discovers that gender stereotyping starts early Read next Rana Foroohar New Hampshire: a tale of two Americas © Ellen Van Engelen Share on Twitter (opens new window) Share on Facebook (opens new window) Share on LinkedIn (opens new window) Email Subscribers can gift articles 54 Save JULY 28, 2017 by: Hattie Garlick Walk into a toyshop today — I dare you. You’ll find yourself plunged into an archaic, alternate universe, where gender segregation is enforced with frightening efficiency and simplicity. It’s done through shading: prim pink play kitchens, princess costumes and plastic dollies to the left; brash blue building blocks, trucks and weapons to the right. Over the past year, there has been a lot of righteous uproar about this “pinkification” of little girls’ lives. Last year, the White House held a conference to explore ways of breaking down gender stereotypes in media and toys. Meanwhile, the UK’s Institute for Engineering and Technology warned that gendered toys were discouraging girls from pursuing careers in those fields. Thirty-one per cent of engineering and tech toys were marketed explicitly at boys, the institute found, compared with just 11 per cent at girls. What, though, if toys aren’t the only problem? What if it’s . . . us? *** In January, the academic journal Science published research from the US investigating the age at which girls begin to think that they are less intellectually brilliant than boys. It’s a pretty subtle process, so the team — led by psychologist Lin Bian — looked at 400 children from a variety of backgrounds and conducted several different tests. Here’s what they concluded: it happens at the age of six. Before they have lost the first of their milk teeth, little girls have lost confidence in their gender’s intellectual ability. The US study told two stories to children between the ages of five and seven. One, they explained, was about a “really, really smart” person; the other, a “really, really nice” one. Afterwards, the children were asked which story was about a girl, and which about a boy. At five, the boys were sure the “really, really smart” character was a boy, and the girls were certain it must be a girl. By six, however, the girls had changed their minds. Over 12 months, they became about 20 per cent less likely to say that person could be of their gender. © Ellen Van Engelen “The late preschool and early elementary school years seem to be a crucial developmental window for children acquiring various stereotypes about gender and intellectual abilities,” says Dario Cvencek, a research scientist whose own work at the University of Washington also focuses on this field. First, he explains, comes the understanding of what gender we are. Next, we learn not only to pay close attention to how society treats other members of our gender but also to apply those stereotypes to ourselves. Accordingly, says Cvencek, “our own results show that gender stereotypes about mathematics are absorbed strikingly early. As early as second grade [when children are seven years old], about 75 per cent of the little girls and boys that we test show evidence of having caught the stereotype that girls don’t do maths.” *** Over the past two years, I have mentored and chaired debates with teenage girls across the country. There is nothing more depressing than asking a room full of bright, conscientious girls who among them thinks that the boys in their peer group will out-achieve them, and seeing a tsunami of hands rise up. Yet it happens. Again, and again. However, there’s a strange dissonance here. By the age of 15, in 70 per cent of countries worldwide, girls outperform boys, not just at reading but also in science and maths. That’s regardless of social, political and economic influences, and even in nations not exactly famed for their feminism — Qatar, for instance, and Jordan. The children in the US study knew that too. When asked to guess which of four fictional children would get the best grades in school, both girls and boys were more likely to pick a girl. Yet somehow, they still didn’t see them as truly “smart”. Why? “We’re looking to get concrete data on that next,” Bian tells me, “but I’d speculate that girls see themselves as doing well for different reasons — because they worked hard, not because they’re naturally brilliant.” *** Indeed, two of the researchers involved in the US study also published another last year, examining PhD students. The most accurate way to predict women’s representation within an academic field, they found, was to use the “brilliance required” hypothesis. In fields stereotyped as requiring innate brilliance — like physics or computer science — women are conspicuously rare. They tested other measures. Do women avoid fields requiring long hours? Perhaps the more a job involves systematising over empathising, the more women are turned off? But no. The “brilliance required” hypothesis was able to accurately predict women’s representation again and again, in a way no other could. When asked which of four fictional children would get the best grades, both girls and boys were more likely to pick a girl — yet they still didn’t see them as ‘smart’ Worse still, these “brilliant” fields are where today’s best-paid jobs are found. Among British women classed as professionals, the most common job is nursing. For men, it’s programming and software development, according to a 2013 ONS report. Programmers earn an average of £30,400 a year in the UK, nurses just £23,319. They are also the jobs of the future. If we want little girls growing up to build robots, instead of being sidelined by them, they need to be able to see themselves in a lab coat. Right now, they don’t. I speak to Eileen Burbidge, chair of Tech City UK and the country’s special envoy for fintech, just as she boards a plane, accompanying the chancellor of the exchequer to a conference in India. She rubbishes the suggestion that girls are not suited to these jobs. “I strongly believe that cultural influences put them off,” she says. “And I can understand if some young girls think they’re not ‘brilliant’ enough. I can say with confidence that, in my first-hand experience, girls are not given as much credit for what they do or achieve as [for] how they look.” Burbidge is a true expert: she has three boys and two girls of her own. “There aren’t enough subtle role models in modern culture,” she continues. “When most people — children or adults, male or female — are asked to think about a doctor, engineer, scientist, mathematician or computer programmer, they will usually visualise a man. We need more subtle cues in mainstream media — across film, TV and the news — that there are respected females in all of these professions. And they needn’t be ‘prominent’ or ‘famous’. It’s the everyday woman working in these professions that is the important fact to convey.” *** In the meantime, we have a major problem. In 2011, Ofsted conducted a nationwide report entitled Girls’ Career Aspirations. It concluded that girls start thinking about their future jobs when they are seven or eight and established that “this thinking was strongly influenced by family and friends . . . These girls were aware of the conventions surrounding ‘girls’ jobs’ and ‘boys’ jobs’ . . . They retained those views throughout their schooling, despite being taught about equality of opportunity and knowing their rights to access any kind of future career.” When you are eight years old, concepts like “equality of opportunity” seem pretty abstract. Your mother, aunt, big sister and babysitter, however, are not. They form what social scientists would call your “achievement environment”. The term was coined to explain the way that we gravitate towards ambitions matching those we see around us. © Ellen Van Engelen From about the ages of five and six, explains Cvencek, “children are paying attention to the stereotypes that are present in their environment. They are assimilating the stereotypes exhibited by parents, educators, peers, games and the media. If we hold biases, then children begin to develop those same biases. Our stereotypes become their stereotypes.” Of course, plenty of boys grow up in impoverished communities or without decent role models. But here’s what the average little girl sees around her in Britain today. Eighty-two per cent of “caring and leisure” jobs are staffed by women, according to a 2013 ONS report. As are 77 per cent of “admin and secretarial” and 63 per cent of “sales and customer service” jobs. Meanwhile, 37 per cent of men are employed in “upper-middle skilled roles” compared with 18 per cent of women. It is a nasty irony that six-year-old girls are clever enough to differentiate between the theory of equality and its reality, and lower their ambitions accordingly. *** There was, however, a glimmer of hope in Ofsted’s 2011 report: “In the few examples where girls had changed their minds and set out on a new and unfamiliar route, that change had often been catalysed by a personal experience of either meeting a professional in school, or directly encountering the new kind of work for themselves.” The psychologist Nilanjana Dasgupta has described much the same phenomenon, calling it “stereotype inoculation” — the way in which a successful role model can help inoculate girls against the preconceptions that might otherwise infect their self-worth. Lots of schools, of course, already have mentoring programmes. But they focus on teenagers. Burbidge says — and the evidence suggests — that encouraging girls into tech and business “has to start at a very young age. By the time girls start secondary school, I believe it’s too late.” What’s needed is a nationwide programme of mentoring, catching girls before they develop a chronic case of low self-worth. I’m setting up a scheme myself, at a small east London primary school where the proportion of children eligible for free school meals is 44 per cent, compared with a national average of 14.5 per cent. It won’t be a charitable act but an economic necessity. The Women and Work Commission claims that unleashing women’s full potential could be worth £23bn a year to the exchequer. And then we could all live happily ever after. Hattie Garlick is setting up The Girls Gang, a mentoring programme for primary school girls Illustration by Ellen Van Engelen
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