Gender Differences in the Distribution of Creativity Scores: Domain-Specific Patterns in Divergent Thinking and Creative Problem Solving

Abstract

The present study examined gender differences in the distribution of creative abilities through the lens of the greater male variability hypothesis, which postulated that men showed greater interindividual variability than women in both physical and psychological attributes (Ellis, 1894/1934). Two hundred and six (51.9% female) undergraduate students in Hong Kong completed two creativity measures that evaluated different aspects of creativity, including: (a) a divergent thinking test that aimed to assess idea generation and (b) a creative problem-solving test that aimed to assess restructuring ability. The present findings extended the research of greater male variability in creativity by showing that men generally exhibited greater variance than women in the overall distribution of the creativity scores in both divergent thinking and creative problem solving, despite trivial gender differences in mean scores. The findings further enriched the discourse of the greater male variability hypothesis by showing interesting domain-specific gendered patterns: (1) greater male variability was more likely to occur in figural forms of creativity, with larger effect sizes, when compared to the variability in verbal forms of creativity; and (2) mixed gendered patterns were found in the upper tails of the creativity score distribution with respect to the verbal domain but not the figural one, despite greater male representation being consistently observed in the lower tail of the distribution. Possible underlying mechanisms and implications were discussed.

Gender Differences in Creativity Among Students in Private Higher Education

“…With respect to the relationship between gender and creativity, females in the current study scored significantly higher than females on the self-assessed measurement of creative behaviour, replicating findings from previous studies of students and adults from the community (e.g., Lee & Ashton, 2004). However, other studies show that males achieve higher results on different measures of creativity and creative behaviour (e.g., Abraham, 2015;Babarović & Šverko, 2013;Chan, 2005;He & Wong, 2021;Kaufman, 2006). In summary, the results from the current work provide further evidence that the different measures of creativity are distinct yet partially overlapping components of a coherent construct of creativity.…”

The Relationship Between Personality Traits and Entrepreneurial Intention Among College Students: The Mediating Role of Creativity

“…Variance inflation factor (VIF) is used to test for multicollinearity. The results of previous empirical studies suggest that differences in gender, majors, and grades can cause significant differences in personality traits ( Russo and Stol, 2020 ), including creativity ( Vedel et al, 2015 ; Zia and Rouhollahi, 2020 ; He and Wong, 2021 ; Said-Metwaly et al, 2021 ) and entrepreneurial intention ( Abba et al, 2021 ; Dao et al, 2021 ; Gurel et al, 2021 ). The t test and ANOVA test yield the following results.…”

Investigation of high school students creative problem-solving attributes

“…Several studies have examined gender differences in creative thinking (e.g. He & Wong, 2021;Hong & Aqui, 2004;Sokić et al, 2021;Walia, 2012). Some studies have shown that boys score higher (DeMoss et al, 1993;He & Wong, 2021), and in others they have shown that girls score higher than boys.…”

“…He & Wong, 2021;Hong & Aqui, 2004;Sokić et al, 2021;Walia, 2012). Some studies have shown that boys score higher (DeMoss et al, 1993;He & Wong, 2021), and in others they have shown that girls score higher than boys. Some other studies found no significant difference between gender and creativity or creative behavior (Baer & Kaufman, 2008;Hong & Migram, 2010;Walia, 2012).…”