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. “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.įor 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. “For girls, this may lead them to doubt their abilities, thus limiting their ideas about their interests and what they can achieve in life.” “Stereotypical views about how boys are smarter than girls can take root in childhood and become a self-fulfilling prophecy,” said Prof Setoh. 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. 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. This belief was stronger among older children and stronger among those children whose parents held the same view. 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. 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. It involved 389 Chinese Singaporean parents and 342 of their children aged 8 to 12. 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. view moreĬhildren 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 photographs have been processed to protect the privacy of the volunteers. Participants with an implicit “brilliance = men” association will react faster to trials involving pictures of men than pictures involving women. This process was repeated in the second half of the trials with female photographs and genius words. Sample test trials from the gender-brilliance IAT.ĭuring half of the trials, participants had to press a key to categorise the male photographs with the genius words.
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