Women And Men Just As Smart; Women Don’t Always Believe It: Study

TEMPE, AZ — Women are just as smart as men. But the problem is, they don’t always believe what their own grade point averages tell them, according to a new study that suggests female college students’ perception of their intelligence could negatively affect their decision to go into fields like science, where women are historically underrepresented.

Arizona State University researcher Katelyn Cooper, the lead author of the study published Wednesday in the journal Advances in Physiology Education, said gender greatly impacts students’ perception of their own intelligence, particularly when they compare themselves to others.

“It's a mindset that has likely been ingrained in female students since they began their academic journeys,” Cooper said.

Cooper has had hundreds of conversation with students as an academic adviser at ASU, where she is a doctoral candidate in the School of Life Sciences, and used them as the basis for the study.

"I would ask students about how their classes were going and I noticed a trend," Cooper said in a news release. "Over and over again, women would tell me that they were afraid that other students thought that they were 'stupid.' I never heard this from the men in those same biology classes, so I wanted to study it."

Cooper and her colleagues asked college students enrolled in a 250-person biology course about their intelligence, specifically in comparison with everyone in the class and with the student they worked most closely with in the class.

The findings were surprising, Cooper said.

Women were far more likely to underestimate their own intelligence than men. And, when comparing a female and a male student, both with a GPA of 3.3, the male student was likely to say he is smarter than 66 percent of the class, and the female student was likely to say she is smarter than only 54 percent of the class.

The pattern continued when students were asked whether they are smarter than the person they worked most with in class. The study revealed male students are 3.2 times more likely than females to say they are smarter than the person they are working with, regardless of whether their class partners are men or women.

A previous ASU study showed that male students in undergraduate biology classes perceive men to be smarter than women about course material. But the study by Cooper and her team is the first to examine undergraduate student perceptions about their own intelligence compared to other people in the class.

That’s a problem that could limit the number of women who enter science fields because they may not think they’re as smart as their male peers, said Sara Brownell, senior author of the study and an assistant professor at ASU. These false perceptions of self-intelligence could be a negative factor in the retention of women in science.

"As we transition more of our courses into active learning classes where students interact more closely with each other, we need to consider that this might influence how students feel about themselves and their academic abilities," Brownell said. "When students are working together, they are going to be comparing themselves more to each other. This study shows that women are disproportionately thinking that they are not as good as other students, so this a worrisome result of increased interactions among students."

The problem doesn’t have an easy fix, Cooper said.

“However, we can start by structuring group work in a way that ensures everyone's voices are heard,” she said. “One of our previous studies showed us that telling students it's important to hear from everyone in the group could be enough to help them take a more equitable approach to group work."

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