Gender Biases in Attributions of Creativity Across Domains

Abstract

ABSTRACT This study examined gender bias in attributions of creativity across domains, as well as whether this bias can be predicted by ascribing agentic-masculine or communal-feminine traits to gender-typed domains. Participants (N = 372) indicated how creative they believe men and women are in nine domains and how important they believe a series of agentic-masculine and communal-feminine traits to be for creativity in five of the domains. Latent difference score modeling was used to determine the average magnitude and direction of gender bias in each creative domain, as well as to extract individual latent bias scores. Results demonstrated that participants believed that women are more creative in six domains, whereas men are more creative in three domains. Paired samples t-tests demonstrated that gender-stereotypic traits were rated as significantly most important for the two domains exhibiting the strongest bias (i.e. communal-feminine traits in crafts and agentic-masculine traits in science). Multiple regression analyses demonstrated that participants’ latent bias scores in five of the domains were predicted by the agentic-masculine and/or communal-feminine traits they attributed to that domain. However, in most cases attributing gender stereotypic traits to a domain predicted bias scores consistent with the belief that men are capable of greater creativity.