Young children are more inclined to believe incorrect math information from men than accurate information from women. This suggests that early gender stereotypes can influence learning itself, not just attitudes toward intelligence as previously thought.
This is according to a study – “Children’s Numerical Estimation Is Biased by Male Informants More Than Female Informants” by Kathleen Cracknell, Julia Hauss, Miaofan Chen, Robert Sierp, Lin Bian, and Jinjing Wang (Jenny) – that was published in the journal Developmental Science.
Numerical estimation is a foundational math skill that predicts long-term academic achievement. While children are born with an intuitive sense of quantity, they generally don’t learn to connect visual representations – such as a handful of grapes – with symbolic numbers until around age 5.
To explore whether gender stereotypes affect this process, the researchers recruited 198 children aged 5 to 7 in the US – 93 girls and 105 boys – to participate in an online estimation task. Study recruitment was conducted through Children Helping Science, a research platform that allows families to participate in child development studies from home.
With help from a caregiver, the participants played a series of online guessing games during which they were asked to estimate the number of dots appearing onscreen. First, the children played the game alone. Then, they were asked to repeat the game with “friends,” a male and female avatar that provided guesses before the child. In some cases, the man overestimated the number of dots and the woman was accurate, and in others it was reversed.
The researchers also included a non-numerical memory game as a control, to ensure that any effects were specific to math, not general trust or attention.
The results were striking. Answers were consistently pulled toward the male’s estimates more than the female’s – even when the male was clearly wrong (such as estimating “24” when there were 12 dots onscreen), and the female was correct.
Equally surprising, when kids were repeatedly exposed to incorrect answers from the male, their later estimates stayed biased even after the avatars were gone, said Hauss, a graduate student in the Department of Psychology and a coauthor of the study.
According to the researchers, the findings show that children aren’t just absorbing stereotypes: They are using them to calibrate their understanding of the world.
“We found that children are not only biased to think that men are more competent but also trust or value math information provided by men more so than information provided by women,” said Wang, who conceptualized and supervised the study.
There is a silver lining for educators. Typically, students learn math from a single teacher and don’t have the opportunity to make gendered comparisons in the classroom. Children also are quick to identify intentional misdirection. When misinformation becomes deceitful, trust erodes and the gender bias is reversed, Hauss said.
Still, the findings are an opportunity to improve educational outcomes and remind educators that children receive and process information through a gendered lens.
“These findings have important implications for combating gender stereotypes and learning challenges in the real world, given that caregivers and teachers are often women,” Wang ended.
