Recent research published in journals Psychology of aesthetics, creativity, and art We provide evidence that women who embrace traits traditionally associated with masculinity tend to display more creative self-confidence. This study suggests that breaking free from traditional female stereotypes may help women stay creatively motivated, especially when faced with negative feedback. These findings provide new understanding of how societal expectations influence women’s innovation.
Although women and men show equal creative abilities in cognitive tests, deep-seated gender differences exist in the real world. Recent data on international patent applications reveals that only a small percentage of named inventors are women. One way to understand this gap is to examine the influence of social gender roles.
“Despite evidence that women are no less creative than men, women are still significantly underrepresented in innovation records, patents, and high-impact academic achievements,” said Ping Li, a professor at the School of Educational Psychology at Chengdu Normal University in China. “Previous research has often examined gender roles and creativity in mixed-sex samples, leaving it unclear how masculinity and femininity specifically shape women’s creativity, especially when women’s creative efforts are not well received.”
Gender roles refer to the behaviors, attitudes, and values that a particular culture expects from men and women. Stereotypical masculinity is often associated with traits such as independence, assertiveness, and self-reliance. On the other hand, typical femininity is usually associated with expressiveness, sensitivity to others, and focus on community.
“This gap led us to focus exclusively on women and investigate both their everyday creative behavior and their responses to creative adversity,” Lee added. Researchers proposed that traits associated with masculinity may help women develop psychological resilience. Psychological resilience is a person’s ability to quickly recover from difficult situations and adapt to changes in the environment.
This resilience can protect one’s confidence when experiencing creative adversity, such as having one’s ideas rejected or criticized. Scientists suggested that strong psychological resilience may help women maintain higher self-esteem for their creativity. This sustained confidence tends to encourage individuals to convert latent creative potential into actual creative behavior.
To investigate these relationships, the researchers designed two separate studies among female college students in southwestern China. In the first study, the sample included 612 participants between the ages of 17 and 24. Scientists used a comprehensive questionnaire to measure several different psychological and behavioral factors.
In this study, participants were asked to rate themselves based on a standard inventory of gender roles to determine their level of stereotypical masculinity and femininity. It also includes a 14-item scale that is widely used to measure psychological resilience. To assess creativity, the researchers asked participants to self-rate their overall creative abilities on a scale of 0 to 10.
Participants also completed an inventory that tracked their actual creative behaviors in daily life. The survey asked simple “yes” or “no” questions about past activities such as drawing pictures, inventing games, and giving speeches. By collecting this data, the researchers aimed to uncover how gender characteristics, resilience, and creative behavior are interconnected.
Data from the first study showed that masculinity has much stronger connections with global creative self-evaluation and everyday creative behavior than femininity. In fact, femininity was not associated with actual creative behavior at all. Researchers found that psychological resilience and an individual’s overall creative self-esteem play a connecting role between masculine traits and creative behavior.
Specifically, women with higher masculinity scores tended to have more psychological resilience. This resilience was associated with higher self-ratings of creativity. Higher self-esteem predicted higher frequency of engaging in actual creative activities in daily life.
“Our key takeaway is that masculine traits (e.g., assertiveness, independence, risk-taking) are more strongly associated with women’s creative confidence and creative engagement than feminine traits, and that when faced with negative feedback, high femininity actually becomes a disadvantage and predicts poorer creative performance,” Lee told SciPost. “Embracing traditional masculine traits and breaking free from stubborn stereotypes of women can help women be more resilient, maintain creative confidence amidst setbacks, and ultimately achieve more creative outcomes.”
Following the study, the researchers conducted a second study with the original 368 female participants to see how these dynamics play out in real-life situations involving adversity. Participants were asked to complete an abnormal usage test using a smartphone application. This is a standard creative task that measures divergent thinking by asking people to come up with as many unique uses as possible for common objects such as bricks or rulers.
Trained raters scored participants’ responses based on three categories. Fluency referred to the total number of ideas generated, flexibility counted the number of different categories into which an idea fell, and originality measured how unique an idea was. The sample was divided into an experimental group consisting of 198 students and a control group consisting of 170 students.
After completing the first two object tasks, participants in the experimental group received automated negative feedback. The computer program told them their answers were so mediocre that their creativity scores were very low. Negative text is accompanied by a crying face emoji to emphasize the simulation of failure.
The control group received no such feedback. After this intervention, all participants completed two additional creative tasks. Throughout the process, students were asked to rate their own creativity on the specific task they had just completed, which served as a task-specific measure of self-evaluation.
Experimental manipulations yielded unexpected results. In fact, the experimental group improved their creative potential and task-specific self-ratings after receiving negative feedback. The control group had a slight decrease in creative performance, which the researchers attributed to general mental fatigue during the test session.
“We were surprised that, rather than hurting the girls, the negative feedback[from the computer program]actually improved their creative potential and task-specific creative self-assessment,” Lee said. “This contradicts the common assumption that criticism impairs creativity.” The scientists noted that the simulated criticism may have encouraged the experimental group to focus more on the task.
The feedback may have served as a motivator because it came from a personal computer program rather than an actual teacher. This seems to encourage students to prove the computer wrong rather than deal a devastating blow to their social image. When the researchers examined the influence of gender roles, they found that masculinity positively predicted how highly women rated their creativity on a particular task.
This is true both before and after negative feedback is given. Masculine traits appeared to help participants maintain creative confidence even in simulated adversity. Interestingly, prior to negative feedback, neither masculinity nor femininity predicted actual creative performance.
“Also, surprisingly, femininity showed no relationship with creative potential before negative feedback, but became negatively associated with creative potential afterward, suggesting that women with high femininity may be more vulnerable to creative adversity,” Lee said. After negative feedback, female students with lower levels of femininity outperformed students with higher levels of femininity on the last two creative tasks.
Although the findings provide insight into how creative confidence works, this study includes certain limitations. “Because our sample consisted only of young female college students from southwest China, our findings may not generalize to older women, other cultures, or men (where femininity may play a positive role),” Li explained. “Also, the negative feedback in Study 2 was provided by a computer program rather than an actual authority figure (e.g., a teacher), and may have been less threatening and therefore less realistic than everyday creative setbacks.”
The authors plan to address these limitations in future projects. “We plan to expand the study to more diverse populations, including men, older adults, and cross-cultural samples to examine how gender roles interact with age and culture,” Lee said. “We also aim to use real human raters to provide negative feedback and track how gender role flexibility changes across generations.”
“Ultimately, we want to design evidence-based interventions to help women (and men) break free from gender stereotypes and grow creatively,” Lee added. The findings of this study do not suggest that women’s characteristics are inherently flawed or that women should suppress their natural qualities. Providing the freedom to explore a wider range of gender characteristics can foster confidence.
“Importantly, this does not mean that femininity is less, but rather suggests that women may be better able to tap into their creative potential by allowing them the freedom to explore a full range of gender roles without being constrained by stereotypes,” Lee explained. Supporting this broader exploration can help individuals recover from setbacks and reach their full creative potential.
“While our findings highlight the benefits of masculinity on women’s creativity, we would like to emphasize that we do not advocate replacing one stereotype with another,” Lee concluded. “Instead, we support system-level changes that allow all individuals, whether male, female or androgynous, to freely explore their gender roles without fear of judgment. Creativity flourishes when people are authentic and resilient, not when they conform to prescribed roles.”
The study, “Are women’s stereotypical masculinity and femininity associated with creativity? An investigation of gender roles and creativity” was authored by Pin Li, Zhitian Skylor Zhang, Manuel DS Hopp, Linlin Luo, and Chang Wang.
