A few years ago, 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.

Implicit bias

A second study from NYU explored 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.

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.

Practical discrimination

So does this mean that such discrimination doesn’t exist in the real world?  Sadly not, as a third NYU study found that in academic disciplines that have a strong perception towards raw talent and brilliance as underpinning success, the more likely it is that women will feel professionally inadequate and suffer from imposter syndrome.

These findings were especially pronounced among women from racial and ethnic minority backgrounds who tend to be underrepresented in the industry.

“Based on previous research, it is likely that women from these groups have stronger impostor feelings in brilliance-oriented fields because they are targeted by negative gender, racial, and ethnic stereotypes about their intellect,” the researchers say.

Feeling inadequate

The results suggest that these feelings of inadequacy are more likely to emerge in certain contexts, such as where the supposed need for brilliance is emphasized.

In a bid to understand why these feelings emerged, the researchers surveyed around 5,000 academics, medical residents, graduate students, and postdoctoral fellows from across nine different universities and 80 different fields.

Participants were asked to rate how often they feel like an imposter and how deep those feelings are.  They were also asked to rate the “brilliance orientation” of their field.  The results show that when a field required more raw talent, or brilliance, it was more likely that women would report feeling like imposters.

What’s more, this feeling was particularly pronounced among women from racial groups that were underrepresented in academia.  This feeling of inadequacy perhaps unsurprisingly came with a reduced sense of belonging to their field attached, while sufferers also said they felt less confident in their ability to succeed.

The findings reinforce the sense that imposter syndrome is as much a consequence of the context within which people operate as an individual affliction.  As such, academia would be well served to try and address that conflict if they wish to have a more diverse workforce.