Studies examining gender and creative performance ratings have offered mixed results. The current meta-analysis integrates insights from gender role theories (Eagly, 1987;Eagly & Karau, 2002) with Woodman et al. (1993) interactionist perspective of creativity to identify factors that explain these observed inconsistencies across studies. Cumulating decades of research from 259 independent studies (N = 79,915), we find a male advantage in creative performance (δ = .13). An examination of contextual moderators reveals that this gender gap is contingent on several social and cultural factors. We observe a decline in the creativity gender gap when the country-level cultural context of the sample is communal and an increase when it is agentic. Results also show that the gender disparity declined over time, but industry gender composition did not influence the gender gap. Interestingly, we find that the gender gap is larger when creative performance is self-versus other-reported. Finally, methodological contingency factors such as publication status, study setting, creativity type, and occupational creativity requirements were also assessed. Overall, our findings clarify gender's relationship with creative performance and underscore the importance of undertaking contingency-based approaches in future research.

Summary Building upon and extending the interactionist perspective of creativity, social role theory, and role congruity theory, we develop an integrated multilevel model to examine gender differences in creative self‐efficacy and determine how the contextual factor of team psychological safety shapes employees' creative self‐efficacy and, through this motivational mechanism, influences their creative performance. Using data from a sample of 335 employees from a large food manufacturer collected over three time periods, we theorize and demonstrate the pivotal role of creative self‐efficacy in explaining gender differences in creative performance. Our findings indicate that women may have lower creative self‐efficacy than men in organizational contexts. However, team psychological safety restores parity between men and women through a cross‐level moderated mediation, such that psychological safety has a stronger effect on women's creative self‐efficacy than that of men, resulting in increased creative performance for women. These findings offer interesting implications for research on gender differences in creative performance and for human resources by pinpointing methods of bridging the existent differences in the creative self‐efficacy of men and women in organizations.