Are Women less creative than Men?

According to a review of research on gender and creativity, the question of whether women are in general more creative than men remain controversial and puzzling due to the heterogeneous nature of the findings associated with this line of research. While most studies examining gender differences in creative ability have focused on divergent thinking, there is little evidence for gender differences on measures of creative potential and ability. Therefore, it is difficult to make any definitive conclusions on this topic.

Study 1

A new study (2022) appearing in the Journal of Applied Psychology provides some much-needed perspective on a controversial question in psychological science: is there a gender difference in creative potential and performance? The authors suggest that while men are generally perceived to be more creative than women, this is probably not the case from an empirical standpoint. Furthermore, new studies show that the stereotype that men are more creative is eroding over time and is less pronounced in countries that have more gender equality.

The researchers found that men were rated to have overall higher creative performance than women. As creativity involves a level of risk-taking, challenging the status quo to come up with a unique and novel solution is often done in an independent and assertive manner. The general perception of creativity is that it is a man's job.

As such, despite having equivalent creative abilities as men, when women try and engage in creative behaviors, they are constrained — either due to their own internalized gender roles or due to the backlash they experience from perceivers for engaging in a masculine activity. To the researchers’ surprise, it was found that the effect of these internalized effects was stronger — the gender difference in creative performance was larger — when individuals evaluated their own creative performance.

Culture played a significant role in determining the gender disparity as well. Cultures that were more masculine (e.g., U.S.) were detrimental for women's creativity, whereas those that were gender-egalitarian or relations-focused (e.g., Nordic countries) were conducive for women's creativity.

Although the findings indicated that the disparity between men's and women's creative performance existed universally, they found optimistic results about the decline in the gender gap in recent years.

Finally, as the nature of gender biases and even creativity may vary across industries, they expected the gender divide to diminish in industries with a greater women presence. Surprisingly, however, the findings indicated that irrespective of the industry, the gender gap in creative performance was problematically pervasive.

Study 2

Devon Proudfoot, a PhD candidate at Duke, and her colleagues Aaron Kay and Christy Koval performed several studies of gender bias and creativity. In one, subjects rated how central certain personality characteristics were to creativity. The results showed that both men and women associated creativity with stereotypically “masculine” traits—independence, daring—more than with “feminine” traits, such as cooperativeness and sensitivity. In another study the researchers asked subjects to evaluate a house design but varied the gender of the architect. Both men and women rated creativity higher when told that the architect was a man.

Study 3

The following research shows completely different outcomes, suggesting the female artists are more creative than male artists.

In the 2020 study, Michael Mauskapf of Columbia Business School, Noah Askin of INSEAD, Sharon Koppman of UC Irvine and Brian Uzzi of Northwestern examined “structural and cultural differences in the work context of creative producers” — an angle they considered to be widely unexplored. They looked at how people come to conclusions through divergent thinking, determined through tests that require a subject to utilize objects in ways that differ from their primary purposes.

At first, Mauskapf, Askin, Koppman and Uzzi’s data, which pulled from a bank of 250,000 songs produced and released between 1955 and 2000, showed no noteworthy difference between men and women when it came to the output of creative work. When the gender composition of genres and the size of an artist’s network of collaborators were taken into consideration, though, the scholars found that female artists actually create more novel songs — works that are more musically fresh and unusual — than male artists. The Echo Nest, a data science company owned by Spotify, provided information on unique acoustic “finger prints” from audio files, analyzing standard musical attributes (e.g., “tempo,” “mode,” “key,” “time signature”), as well as aural and emotive dimensions of music (“valence,” “danceability,” “acousticness,” “energy,” “liveness” and “speechiness”).

“These results suggest that social factors, rather than differences in raw ability, are responsible for gender disparities in creative production,” researchers wrote.

The study notes that women’s higher rate of novel music production actually seems to be a product of unfairness. “The tendency for women’s performance to be discounted reflects a much broader phenomenon inside and outside organizations,” researchers observed. “For the same levels of performance, women tend to receive more negative evaluations than men, and they have to outperform men to receive comparable evaluations. To overcome this ‘double standard,’ female minorities work harder.”

Study 4

Another study, examining the question on why the creative industries are dominated by men, come to the unusual assessment that the main cause of such disparity is caused by women’ higher compliance rates.

Studies examining the personality differences between men and women have found that women tend to be more compliant than men. A recent study from LinkedIn showed that women apply for 20% fewer roles than men because they will only apply for the role if they feel like they meet 100% of the criteria. In contrast, most men said they will apply if they meet 60% of the criteria. With this in mind, it’s possible that women’s compliance is stopping them from applying for industry jobs.

The same study found that most women were confident that they could complete the job, but because they didn’t meet all of the requirements, they felt like applying wasn’t a good use of their time.

Tash Willcocks, head of Learning Design at Snook explained “I don’t think the bias is coming from companies, I think it’s the women editing themselves out and this is becoming ingrained before we’ve even get to them in education.

“When women are applying for jobs they follow the instructions but then think ‘Oh no I don’t have that skill so I’m stepping out.”

Summary

While there is no strong evidence indicating that gender has a significant impact on personal creativity, there is a prevalent bias in public perception that men are more creative than women. This belief is often influenced by the cultural background of society, which perpetuates and reinforces this perception.