Last year, researchers from New York University explored our perceptions around ‘brilliance’, and more importantly, who we tend to regard as brilliant, or indeed capable of it.

The research builds upon previous work by the team that found that gender biases around creative brilliance kick in by the time we’re 6 years old, with girls less likely to associate brilliance with women by that age, and subsequently become less likely to engage in activities that are believed to require brilliance.

“Overall, these findings reinforce the conclusion that the gender-brilliance stereotype is acquired relatively early on in life, but they also suggest that this stereotype may ‘look’ different depending on the ethnicity of the women and men that children are reasoning about,” the researchers say.

Gender biases

A second team from NYU have returned to the issue to explore just how implicit our biases around brilliance are, with a particular focus on any gender divide that may exist on the issue.

The team had previously found that women tend to be underrepresented in careers where success is believed to be highly dependent upon the intellectual ability of the individual, such as in technology or science related fields.

The researchers wanted to understand some of the possible causes of this phenomenon. Were people associating genius more with men than with women, or were these fields less welcoming to women?  The challenge was compounded by the difficulty in accurately measuring stereotyping.  People are often quite reluctant to admit they might even have stereotypes, so directly asking them is unlikely to yield accurate responses.

Measuring indirectly

The team attempted to overcome this by testing for it indirectly.  The aim is to uncover the implicit stereotypes that might associate traits, such as brilliance, with certain groups, such as men.  The team did this via the Implicit Association Test (IAT), which is a long-established tool to measure the degree of overlap between concepts.

Participants in the study were shown a series of words and pictures on a computer screen, before being asked to sort them into two categories.  The researchers hypothesized that if brilliance is implicitly associated with men more than women, then the volunteers would sort the pictures and words associating this with men faster than they would those to women.

Across five experiments across 78 countries, the researchers discovered clear evidence of implicit stereotypes that associate brilliance more with men than with women.  What’s more, this bias was striking in that it was similar in strength to previously discovered biases associating men with careers more than women, with women being associated more with family than men.

What is perhaps most interesting is that often, when asked to explicitly state whether they associated brilliance with particular genders, the volunteers would often associate brilliance more with women than they would with men, which is obviously the opposite to that revealed by their implicit biases.

“A particularly exciting finding from this work is that, if anything, people explicitly say that they associate women with brilliance,” the researchers conclude. “Yet implicit measures reveal a different story about the more automatic gender stereotypes that come to mind when thinking about brilliance.”