Girls usually have less confidence in their talent than boys – the difference is particularly pronounced in economically highly developed countries. In one country it is exactly the opposite.
On average, 15-year-old girls believe less in their own talents than boys of the same age. This was the result of a special evaluation of the international PISA study from 2018, for which more than 500,000 students in 72 countries were surveyed.
The differences are all the greater, the higher the economic development status of a country and the better the performance of the students surveyed. Clotilde Napp from the University of Paris-Dauphine and Thomas Breda from the Paris School of Economics published their results in the journal Science Advances.
The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) usually carries out the PISA studies every three years. The international comparison of students includes the 38 OECD countries and 34 other countries. In addition to abilities in mathematics, science and reading, the attitudes of the students are also recorded by agreeing with certain statements. In 2018, one of those statements was, “If I fail, I’m afraid that maybe I don’t have enough talent.” Across all respondents, 47 percent of boys and 61 percent of girls agreed with this statement.
Gender Talent Stereotype
“The belief that they are less talented than boys can affect girls’ self-confidence and lead them to protect themselves and therefore avoid challenging situations and opportunities,” write Napp and Breda.
They attribute the result to a gender-specific talent stereotype: According to this, boys are considered to be more talented than girls in many areas, especially in mathematics. Previous studies have shown that parents consider their male offspring to be more talented and that when asked to draw an intelligent person, most girls and boys portray a grown man.
Saudi Arabia is the only country in the Pisa study where girls believe in their own talents more than boys. For everyone else it was the other way around. In the predominantly highly developed OECD countries, the difference between the sexes on this question is more pronounced than in the other countries – although equality between women and men is also more strongly realized there. The authors of the study attribute this paradoxical result, among other things, to the fact that individualism is more firmly anchored in wealthier societies and that self-realization and self-expression are more important.
Differences in Germany more pronounced
Napp and Breda found a strong statistical association with willingness to compete, as measured by the statement, “I enjoy working in situations that involve competition with others.” Here the gender difference was nearly as pronounced as in belief in it own talent. The same applies to self-confidence and the expectation of later working in information and communication technology: In all of these categories, girls scored lower than boys. According to the results of the study, gender-specific talent stereotypes are more pronounced in Germany than the OECD average.
The researchers were surprised to find that the better the students were, the greater the gender difference in terms of belief in talent, competitiveness and self-confidence. Although high-performing girls have every reason to believe in their own talent, far more good students than good students believe they are talented. dpa
