The gender imbalance in STEM subjects dominates current debates about women's underrepresentation in academia. However, women are well represented at the Ph.D. level in some sciences and poorly represented in some humanities (e.g., in 2011, 54% of U.S. Ph.D.'s in molecular biology were women versus only 31% in philosophy). We hypothesize that, across the academic spectrum, women are underrepresented in fields whose practitioners believe that raw, innate talent is the main requirement for success, because women are stereotyped as not possessing such talent. This hypothesis extends to African Americans' underrepresentation as well, as this group is subject to similar stereotypes. Results from a nationwide survey of academics support our hypothesis (termed the field-specific ability beliefs hypothesis) over three competing hypotheses.

Common stereotypes associate high-level intellectual ability (brilliance, genius, etc.) with men more than women. These stereotypes discourage women's pursuit of many prestigious careers; that is, women are underrepresented in fields whose members cherish brilliance (such as physics and philosophy). Here we show that these stereotypes are endorsed by, and influence the interests of, children as young as 6. Specifically, 6-year-old girls are less likely than boys to believe that members of their gender are "really, really smart." Also at age 6, girls begin to avoid activities said to be for children who are "really, really smart." These findings suggest that gendered notions of brilliance are acquired early and have an immediate effect on children's interests.

`Ducks lay eggs' is a true sentence, and `ducks are female' is a false one. Similarly, `mosquitoes carry the West Nile virus' is obviously true, whereas `mosquitoes don't carry the West Nile virus' is patently false. This is so despite the egg-laying ducks' being a subset of the female ones and despite the number of mosquitoes that don't carry the virus being ninety-nine times the number that do. Puzzling facts such as these have made generic sentences defy adequate semantic treatment. However complex the truth conditions of generics appear to be, though, young children grasp generics more quickly and readily than seemingly simpler quantifiers such as `all' and `some'. I present an account of generics that not only illuminates the strange truth conditions of generics, but also explains how young children find them so comparatively easy to acquire. I then argue that generics give voice to our most cognitively primitive generalizations and that this hypothesis accounts for a variety of facts ranging from acquisition patterns to cross-linguistic data concerning the phonological articulation of operators. I go on to develop an account of the nature of these cognitively fundamental generalizations and argue that this account explains the strange truth-conditional behavior of generics.

Social essentialism entails the belief that certain social categories (e.g., gender, race) mark fundamentally distinct kinds of people. Essentialist beliefs have pernicious consequences, supporting social stereotyping and contributing to prejudice. How does social essentialism develop? In the studies reported here, we tested the hypothesis that generic language facilitates the cultural transmission of social essentialism. Two studies found that hearing generic language about a novel social category diverse for race, ethnicity, age, and sex led 4-y-olds and adults to develop essentialist beliefs about that social category. A third study documented that experimentally inducing parents to hold essentialist beliefs about a novel social category led them to produce more generic language when discussing the category with their children. Thus, generic language facilitates the transmission of essentialist beliefs about social categories from parents to children.

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Women’s underrepresentation in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields is a prominent concern in our society and many others. Closer inspection of this phenomenon reveals a more nuanced picture, however, with women achieving parity with men at the Ph.D. level in certain STEM fields, while also being underrepresented in some non-STEM fields. It is important to consider and provide an account of this field-by-field variability. The field-specific ability beliefs (FAB) hypothesis aims to provide such an account, proposing that women are likely to be underrepresented in fields thought to require raw intellectual talent—a sort of talent that women are stereotyped to possess less of than men. In two studies, we provide evidence for the FAB hypothesis, demonstrating that the academic fields believed by laypeople to require brilliance are also the fields with lower female representation. We also found that the FABs of participants with college-level exposure to a field were more predictive of its female representation than those of participants without college exposure, presumably because the former beliefs mirror more closely those of the field’s practitioners (the direct “gatekeepers”). Moreover, the FABs of participants with college exposure to a field predicted the magnitude of the field’s gender gap above and beyond their beliefs about the level of mathematical and verbal skills required. Finally, we found that beliefs about the importance of brilliance to success in a field may predict its female representation in part by fostering the impression that the field demands solitary work and competition with others. These results suggest new solutions for enhancing diversity within STEM and across the academic spectrum.

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Psychological essentialism is a pervasive conceptual bias to view categories as reflecting something deep, stable, and informative about their members. Scholars from diverse disciplines have long theorized that psychological essentialism has negative ramifications for inter-group relations, yet little previous empirical work has experimentally tested the social implications of essentialist beliefs. Three studies (N = 127, ages 4.5-6) found that experimentally inducing essentialist beliefs about a novel social category led children to share fewer resources with category members, but did not lead to the out-group dislike that defines social prejudice. These findings indicate that essentialism negatively influences some key components of inter-group relations, but does not lead directly to the development of prejudice. RESEARCH HIGHLIGHTS• Essentialism has been proposed to have negative social ramifications.• Three studies experimentally tested this proposal among young children.• Essentialism led children to withhold resources from out-group members.• Essentialism did not lead to out-group dislike. | INTRODUCTIONExpecting a gentle baby tiger to inevitably grow up to be ferocious, an apple seed to develop into an apple tree even if planted in an olive grove, or a young girl growing up in a household of boys to prefer princesses to trucks, all reflect a conceptual commitment to psychological essentialism (Medin & Ortony, 1989). Psychological essentialism is a pervasive conceptual bias to view categories (e.g., tigers, apple trees, girls) as reflecting something deep, stable, and informative about their members, as highly predictive of individual development regardless of other influences, and as marking fundamental similarities among members and differences between kinds (Gelman, 2004). Essentialist beliefs shape how people represent and reason about many types of categories from at least the early preschool years onward (Gelman, 2003).Essentialism has most often been studied in the case of biological categories, such as animal species. For example, essentialist beliefs about tigers entail thinking that whether an animal is a tiger is stable and determined by birth, that tigers are fundamentally similar to each other and different from non-tigers, and that an animal -once born to tiger parents -will inevitably grow up to be ferocious, even if it looks different from other tigers (e.g., is white instead of orange) or is raised in an unusual environment (e.g., in a zoo, where it has few opportunities to learn or practice ferocious behaviors; Gelman, 2004;Medin & Ortony, 1989;Prentice & Miller, 2007). By at least age 4, children make inferences in line with each of these beliefs (Gelman & Markman, 1986, 1987Gelman & Wellman, 1991;Waxman, Medin, & Ross, 2007; for review see Gelman, 2003).In the case of animal categories, psychological essentialism may help get conceptual development off the ground and facilitate knowledge acquisition by allowing children to overlook superficial differences (e.g., between orange ...