Gender and creative ability: Mean differences and performance variability

Abstract

Studies examining gender differences in creative abilities remain inconsistent and call for further research using diverse measures. The current study examined gender differences in mean performance, as well as differences in variability on different performance criteria for male and female participants. The study includes a sample of children and early-to-mid adolescents (N = 678; 1st–10th grade in primary and secondary schools) and uses tasks in verbal (storytelling) and figural domains (incomplete figures) scored for six performance criteria (creativity, novelty/originality, likability, elaboration, humor, and emotion use). Similar to previous research, when mean differences in performance emerged, they favored girls; however, these differences tended to be small and not consistent across all performance criteria. The greater male variability hypothesis in performance was not supported for any of the performance measures. These results point to the limits of the greater male variability hypothesis and the need to examine gender differences in creative abilities across a broad range of tasks and domains and investigate developmental factors that could be related to the emergence of gender differences.