In modern-day Western culture where gender equality has become generally more accepted, women still feel the need to sacrifice pushing their absolute boundaries. For some reason, women unintentionally hold themselves back, causing them to still be dealing with a gender gap in some professions. Recently, a Psychology Today article picked up a study from the 1980s on fifth grade children. The study shows that bright young girls were the ones who had the greatest struggles with the harder materials.
She found that bright girls, when given something to learn that was particularly foreign or complex, were quick to give up — and the higher the girl's IQ, the more likely they were to throw in the towel. In fact, the straight-A girls showed the most helpless responses. Bright boys, on the other hand, saw the difficult material as a challenge and found it energizing. They were more likely to redouble their efforts, rather than give up.
What this shows is that bright girls view talent as innate and unchangeable, where as bright boys seem to believe that talents are something that comes from practice and effort. A majority of this is believed to come from early education where girls are praised for having self-control or being clever, making girls think it is something they are born having or not. On the other hand, young boys tend to be wilder, and are given more feedback that capitalizes on effort (i.e., “If you would just sit still for one second, you might learn something.”)
This thinking often comes to define young girls as they grow up, causing them to become their own worst enemy. We are harder on ourselves, we hold ourselves back, we think that having the ability to do something comes from innate talent. We don’t realize that we can learn.
This can define us in our professions the same professions that are often male-dominated where women must go above and beyond to be successful. Combined with the still-existing gender gaps, how young girls are raised thinking that they can’t because they weren’t born knowing it, makes success for women enormously difficult.
