The Influence of Gender on Academic Performance and Psychological Resilience, and the Relationship Between Both: Understanding the Differences Through Gender Stereotypes

Abstract

Numerous studies have shown that psychological resilience is a key capability for students to succeed in an academic setting, but few of them have analyzed this connection from the perspective of gender. With the hypothesis that resilience and academic performance correlations are displayed differently across genders, we used the RESI-M questionnaire and academic grades to analyze this assumption. The results showed that there are gender differences in terms of the relationship between psychological resilience and academic performance. While we found that for women some factors of psychological resilience did correlate with their grades, no relationship between any of the factors and academic performance was found in men. As gender theory has claimed, men and women show differences in their behavior due to gender socialization and through the influence of gender stereotypes. Concerning these differences, our results demonstrate that while women make use of their resilience capacity in the form of planning skills and social support to perform better in higher education, men do not. Using our theoretical framework, these results are consistent with how women are socialized to make more effort in the academic setting. Men, on the other hand, tend to be less involved, since trying academically would make them “less of a man”. These results have some important implications for gender equality.