“Who Has to Work Harder, Girls or Boys?” Children's Gender Stereotypes About Required Effort in Math and Reading

Our culture attributes women's and girls’ ability in mathematics and related domains to their efforts more so than men's and boys’—a stereotype that contributes to inequities in scientific and technical careers. Here, we provide the first investigation of this gender stereotype in children, examining its endorsement across a broad age range and assessing its links to student motivation. Specifically, we investigated 6- to 12-year-old US elementary school students’ stereotypes about how hard girls and boys have to work to be good at math and, as a comparison, reading (N = 246; 50% girls; 50% White, 19% Asian, 9% Multiracial, 6% Black). We also tested whether these stereotypes are related to children's self-efficacy, interest, and anxiety in math and reading, and whether these links differ in strength across age. Although we anticipated that, like US adults, children would stereotype girls as having to work harder than boys to be good at math, we found that—in line with previously documented gender ingroup biases—younger children reported that effort was less of a requirement for their own (vs. another) gender; this ingroup bias was absent among older children. However, consistent with our hypotheses, children who more strongly believed their own gender needed to work harder to be good in a subject also reported lower self-efficacy in that subject, and older children reported lower interest in it as well. The present research contributes to our understanding of how to effectively encourage student motivation in school.