Girls, Gifted

Coming out of the Kitchen

Two eminent educational researchers who emerged in the 1920s significantly challenged prevailing views of gifted girls as homogeneous in intellectual ability and well-suited primarily for home-making responsibilities. At Stanford University, cognitive psychologist Lewis Terman countered the early ripe, early rot view of precocious children and dispelled myths of social ineptness, physical inferiority, and mental instability to provide a profile of well-adjusted social skills, above-average height, and capable leadership abilities. Terman began the classic longitudinal study Genetic Studies of Genius work in 1921 with 1,528 11-year-olds (856 boys and 672 girls) who scored 135 or higher on the newly developed Stanford-Binet IQ test.

In addition to repeated IQ measures, Terman collected data on gifted children's personal interests, family life, and other nonintellectual areas. Rather than burning out precocious abilities at a young age, he found the gifted children emerged successfully as high-achieving adults who made productive contributions to society. Still in progress with the aging Termites, as they're called, results indicate many of the grown-up gifted girls in Terman's study became professional career women who remained unmarried or married later in life and either did not have children or raised fewer children. Although he held a view of inherited intelligence that placed greater emphasis on genetics than environment in developing gifts and talents, Terman advocated early identification of gifted, accelerated study, differentiated curriculum, a focus on student interests, and specialized training for teachers of the gifted.

Leta Hollingworth, an educational psychologist at Columbia University, challenged cultural and societal limitations for women throughout her life and conducted large-scale gender research to disprove the implications of the variability hypothesis applied to mental ability: that men demonstrated a wider range of mental abilities and therefore achieved eminence or required institutionalization in greater numbers than did women who possessed a more static range of intellectual ability. Examining 1,000 newborn boy and 1,000 newborn girl babies, Hollingworth found more similarities than differences between genders, indicating the possibility of great accomplishment for girls given similar educational and career opportunities as boys.

...