Pre-teen children believe 'brilliance' is a male trait, and this stereotype increases in strength up to the age of twelve

Children hold stereotypical views that 'brilliance' is a male trait, and this belief strengthens as they grow up to the age of twelve, researchers from Singapore and the United States have reported.

The study led by Nanyang Technological University, Singapore (NTU Singapore) in collaboration with New York University, was published in the scientific journal Child Development in May 2022. It involved 389 Chinese Singaporean parents and 342 of their children aged 8 to 12.

Tests were carried out to measure the extent to which parents and their children associate the notion of brilliance with men, and to probe the relationship between parents and their children's views.

The study defined brilliance as an exceptional level of intellectual ability and results showed that children are as likely to associate brilliance with men, as their parents are.

This belief was stronger among older children and stronger among those children whose parents held the same view.

While previous research on gender stereotypes has found the idea that giftedness is a male trait can emerge at around the age of six, it was not known whether and how this stereotype changes over the course of childhood, until now.

Lead author of the study, Associate Professor Setoh Peipei from NTU Singapore's School of Social Sciences, said the Singapore-based study is the first to identify that the tendency to associate brilliance with men (also known as the 'brilliance equals to men' stereotype) increases in strength through the primary school years, and reaches the level of belief seen in adults by the age of 13.

"Stereotypical views about how boys are smarter than girls can take root in childhood and become a self-fulfilling prophecy," said Prof Setoh. "For girls, this may lead them to doubt their abilities, thus limiting their ideas about their interests and what they can achieve in life."

"Our research work shows parents must also be included in policies and school programmes to effectively combat children's gender stereotypes from a young age," she added.

For example, as previous studies have found that parents use different explanation styles for daughters and for sons, the research team said programmes to train parents and teachers to be mindful of balancing their behaviour during interactions with children -- especially with girls -- could be introduced.

The authors say the study offers evidence to support Singapore's push to close the gender gap in the Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) sectors.

While Singapore has the second highest in the world OECD PISA scores in mathematics, science and reading, a recent study by the Promotion of Women in Engineering, Research, and Science (POWERS) programme at NTU Singapore found that women in Singapore are less confident in their math and science abilities compared to men. Women are also more likely than men to perceive gender barriers to STEM career entry and career progress.

How the study was conducted

The researchers used the Implicit Association Test (IAT) -- a commonly-used implicit measure of stereotyping -- to evaluate parents' and children's behaviour. During the test, participants were asked to categorise photographs of men and women, along with two sets of words. One set of 'genius words' referred to the notion of brilliance and included words such as "super-smart" and "genius," while the other set of words referred to creativity (control attribute).

During the first half of the trials, participants had to press a key to categorise the male photographs with the genius words. This process was repeated in the second half of the trials with female photographs and genius words. Participants with an implicit association of men being brilliant will react faster to the task of categorising genius words with the male photographs than the same task with female photographs.

Results revealed an average D score (a metric of the strength of the stereotypical 'intellectual brilliance = men' association) of 0.16, indicating that Singaporean children associate brilliance with men more than women and that this stereotypical belief increased in strength with age among the child sample and reached stereotype levels comparable to those of adults by age 12. Thereafter, there was little change in their perspective.

In the second part of the study, the researchers investigated scores from parent-child pairs who took the tests separately but at the same time and found that children's scores were correlated to their parents' test scores. This finding suggests that during the earlier years of primary school, parents may play a role in their children's acquisition of the 'brilliance equals to men' stereotype.

Further analysis revealed that as the age of the boys that were tested got older, they were less likely to hold the same stereotypical views of males as more brilliant as their parents. However, for girls, their stereotypes remained closely linked to their parents' stereotypes throughout the primary school years.

Co-author Andrei Cimpian, Professor of Psychology at New York University said, "This study adds to the evidence that the gender imbalances observed in many prestigious careers are not a function of differences between women and men in their inherent aptitudes or interests. Rather, these imbalances are the product of the messages that young people are getting from those around them about what women and men are supposedly -- and supposed to be -- like. As a society, we have a responsibility to work toward addressing this issue."

Moving forward, the research team is studying whether this gender stereotype about brilliance may differently impact primary and secondary school girls' and boys' outcomes in math -- a core STEM subject that is typically believed to require intellectual brilliance to excel in.

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Shining new light on stepparent fairy-tale stereotype

Although the fairy tale of the wicked stepmother is a tale as old as time, the effects of blending children with their new stepfamilies may not be as grim as once thought.

In fact, new research shows that stepchildren are not at a disadvantage compared to their peers from single-parent households and actually experience better outcomes than their halfsiblings -- good news for the more than 113 million Americans that are part of a steprelationship.

Led by East Carolina University anthropologist Ryan Schacht and researchers from the University of Utah, the study, "Was Cinderella just a fairy tale? Survival differences between stepchildren and their half-siblings," is available in the May edition of the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B.

The study challenges the "Cinderella effect" theory. The effect contends that conflict within stepfamilies over physical, financial and emotional resources leads to higher mortality risks for stepchildren, and is a main factor in higher rates of abuse and neglect. The phenomenon suggests that stepparents play a major role in this abuse, hoarding resources for their biological children and leading to negative outcomes for stepchildren.

Schacht proposes that previous studies have placed blame for the negative outcomes associated with parental loss on stepparents yet have done so through an an "apples-to-oranges comparison." Specifically, they compare of the long-term outcomes of children who have suffered trauma like parental loss versus children from stable households. When the team compared stepchild outcomes more appropriately among those children who too have experienced the economic and emotional hardships associated with parental loss, they found no difference. Specifically, the introduction stepparenents did not increase stepchild mortality.

"The idea of a stepparent, especially the stepmother, as being an agent of evil seems to be a story as old as time," Schacht said. "It's easy to sell the Cinderella effect's result because we've been told these stories about the problems that stepfamilies experience for hundreds of years.

"We're not denying that some stepchildren suffer," he said. "However, if we truly believe it is the stepparent that is the source of negative outcomes for a stepchild, then we need to compare similar environments and experiences. A child that hasn't lost a parent through death or divorce hasn't experienced the same trauma that a stepchild has; comparing those two experiences and blaming the stepparent for diverging outcomes isn't a fair comparison."

The study compared the mortality of stepchildren whose parents remarried after the death of a spouse to children whose parents did not remarry and found three key findings:

* Parental mortality has a negative effect on children under 18 years old, especially for infants losing a mother;

* Children whose parents remarried after the loss of a spouse did not suffer a mortality rate any greater than children whose parents did not remarry; and

* Stepchildren received a protective effect when a halfsibling was introduced to their new family.

"The metrics of what makes a family successful -- household stability, relationship stability and economic stability -- are achieved by stepparents investing in their stepchildren to make that a reality. Coming in with an antagonistic approach doesn't make sense if stepparents want their relationship to succeed."

The research team analyzed a data set of more than 400,000 children from Utah from 1847-1940. Schacht said the time period provided an opportunity to analyze stepchild mortality rates in families during a natural fertility period where families were larger in size and most stepfamilies were formed due to the death of a parent.

The study adds that children who have suffered parental loss have more in common with their peers from single-parent households, facing many of the same educational, economic and health care disparities.

Read more at Science Daily

'I'll sleep when I'm dead': The sleep-deprived masculinity stereotype

 In the United States, the average American sleeps less than the minimum seven hours of sleep per night recommended by the Center for Disease Control, and nearly half of Americans report negative consequences from insufficient sleep. This problem appears to be especially prevalent in men, who report getting significantly less sleep, on average, than women.

A cultural complication is the notion that getting less than the recommended amount of sleep signals something positive about an individual. For example, US President Donald Trump has boasted about getting less than four hours of sleep per night and regularly derogates his political opponent Joe Biden as "Sleepy Joe."

"The Sleep-Deprived Masculinity Stereotype," a new paper in the Journal of the Association for Consumer Research, examines a possible stereotype connecting sleep and masculinity along with its underlying mechanisms and its social implications.

Authors Nathan B. Warren and Troy H. Campbell conducted 12 experiments involving 2,564 American participants to demonstrate that a sleep-deprived masculinity stereotype exists. In one experiment, participants were asked to imagine seeing a man shopping for a bed. Then, a salesperson asked the man, "How much do you normally sleep?" The results found that the mean masculinity rating for participants in the lots of sleep condition was significantly lower than the mean masculinity rating for participants in the little sleep condition.

In another experiment, participants were asked to ascribe different attributes to a male character, assigned to either a "very masculine and manly" man or a "not very masculine and not very manly" man. Participants in the masculine condition described their character sleeping 33 minutes less sleep per night than the characters described in the not masculine condition. A final experiment showed that participants who imagined stating they sleep more than average felt significantly less masculine than participants who imagined stating they sleep less than average.

Collectively, the experiments found that men who sleep less are seen as more masculine and more positively judged by society. The same patterns were not consistently observed for perceptions of women.

"The social nature of the sleep-deprived masculinity stereotype positively reinforces males who sleep less, even though sleeping less contributes to significant mental and physical health problems," the authors write. This may be particularly detrimental because men frequently have significantly more negative attitudes towards seeking psychological help. "Unfortunately, the problems created by the sleep-deprived masculinity stereotype may reach beyond individuals and into society, as men who sleep less are found to be more aggressive and violent." This is an example of the restrictive and toxic characteristics of masculinity, "which can be harmful to men's health and society at large."

Read more at Science Daily