Career aspirations of young men and women are commonly shaped by gender related norms.
Such that males are stereotypically better at math than females which deters women from entering technical fields or getting upper level degrees in fields where the students are considered brilliant, such as physics, mathematics and philosophy.
First the children were told a story about someone who was "really, really smart" (a child-friendly equivalence to genius) and they had to guess the gender of the protagonist. Then the …show more content…
At age 5 both girls and boys score their gender with the same brilliance score while as the children get older, girls score themselves much lower in red than boys do in blue.
While Study 1 and 2 asked the children who was perceived as smarter, they were also asked who seemed "really, really nice", a stereotype usually held by women. Children then scored their gender on how nice they were perceived.
Graph B resulted in both boys and girls at age 5 show similar scoring of their gender being "really, really nice" while as the children got older, boys (blue) decreased niceness score while girls(red) increasingly scored their gender as nice. Then with a larger group of children evaluated adults and children again girls scored their gender as nicer than males did at all ages as seen in Graph D.
A third study was done where 64 children were introduced to two new games, "Zarky" and "Impok", and were told one was for really smart kids and the other was for hard-working kids.
In study 4,96 children ages 5 and 6 were given the "smart" game and the different aged children's interest was gauged on the same