Girls at age 6 less likely than boys to think they’re brilliant

Who run the world? Girls — but maybe someone should tell them that. Girls begin losing faith in their intellectual prowess as early as age 6 — and wind up avoiding activities designed for the so-called smarties, according to a recent report published in the journal Science. The group of four studies, conducted on 400 kids, ultimately found that “many children assimilate the idea that brilliance is a male quality at a young age.” But they don’t all start out that way.A researcher in one study, for example, told children a story about a “really, really smart” person — the childhood analog for adult brilliance — without hinting at the protagonist’s gender. The experiment then showed kids “four unfamiliar adults,” two men and two women, and asked them to guess which was the “really, really smart” person.Kids were also shown pairs of adults of the same or different gender and asked to choose the “really, really smart” one, and asked to assign attributes or objects to pictures of men and women. At age 5, both girls and boys “associated brilliance with their own gender to a similar extent,” the researchers wrote. At ages 6 and 7, though, girls were “significantly less likely than boys to associate brilliance with their own gender” — and a subsequent study found they were more likely to shy away from games supposedly for “children who are really, really smart.” When they investigated whether girls’ decline in intellectual self-esteem was related to how they viewed school achievement, however, older girls were actually more likely to think girls earned top grades than older boys were to believe the same of boys.Not only do we see that girls just starting out in school are absorbing some of society’s stereotyped notions of brilliance, but these young girls are also choosing activities based on these stereotypes,” study co-author Andrei Cimpian, a professor at New York University, said in a statement. “This is heartbreaking.”