The impact of mothers' gender-role stereotypic beliefs on mothers' and children's ability perceptions.

Abstract

The focus of this study is the relation between mothers' gender stereotypic beliefs, their perceptions of their children's abilities, and their children's self-perceptions in 3 activity domains. Approximately 1,500 mothers and their 11- to 12-year-old children responded to questions about the children's abilities in the math, sports, and social domains. It was predicted that mothers' beliefs about their children would be moderated by their gender stereotypic beliefs about the abilities of female and male people in general. As predicted, path analyses revealed that mothers' gender stereotypic beliefs interact with the sex of their child to influence their perceptions of the child's abilities. Mothers' perceptions, in turn, mediate the influence of past performance on children's self-perceptions in each domain.

Cites (7)

1. Availability: A heuristic for judging frequency and probability
   Tversky, Amos, Kahneman, Daniel · 1973 · Cognitive Psychology
2. The measurement of psychological androgyny
   Bem, Sandra L. · 1974 · Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology
3. The Perceived Competence Scale for Children
   Harter, Susan · 1982 · Child Development
4. Gender role stereotypes, expectancy effects, and parents' socialization of gender differences
   Eccles, Jacquelynne S., Jacobs, Janis E., Harold, Rena D. · 1990 · Journal of Social Issues
5. The dilution effect: Nondiagnostic information weakens the implications of diagnostic information
   Nisbett, Richard E., Zukier, Henry, Lemley, Ronald E. · 1981 · Cognitive Psychology
6. A new perspective on women's math achievement.
   Kimball, Meredith M. · 1989 · Psychological Bulletin
7. Stereotypes and standards of judgment.
   Biernat, Monica, Manis, Melvin, Nelson, Thomas E. · 1991 · Journal of Personality and Social Psychology

Show all 7 references

Cited by (20)

1. The police officer's dilemma: Using ethnicity to disambiguate potentially threatening individuals.
   Correll, Joshua, Park, Bernadette, Judd, Charles M., Wittenbrink, Bernd · 2002 · Journal of Personality and Social Psychology
2. Connecting high school physics experiences, outcome expectations, physics identity, and physics career choice: A gender study
   Hazari, Zahra, Sonnert, Gerhard, Sadler, Philip M., Shanahan, Marie‐Claire · 2010 · Journal of Research in Science Teaching
3. Improving adolescents' standardized test performance: An intervention to reduce the effects of stereotype threat
   Good, Catherine, Aronson, Joshua, Inzlicht, Michael · 2003 · Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology
4. Children's competence and value beliefs from childhood through adolescence: Growth trajectories in two male-sex-typed domains.
   Jennifer A. Fredricks, Jacquelynne S. Eccles · 2002 · Developmental Psychology
5. Women's underrepresentation in science: sociocultural and biological considerations
   Ceci, Stephen J., Williams, Wendy M., Barnett, Susan M. · 2009 · Psychological Bulletin

See all 459