• Gifted girls tend to score more like males than do nongifted females on measures of interests, values, and personalities.
• Women with high ability tend to be more achievement oriented and are more interested in male-dominated professions.
• Gifted girls are often more independent, rebellious against sex-role stereotyping and rejecting of outside influences than nongifted girls
• As with nongifted girls, gifted girls bear the burden of female socialisation: they feel strongly to nurture others, they care deeply about relationships, they prize family life, they fear loneliness, and they have difficulty placing their own needs above the needs of others.
• Gifted girls display an enhanced ability to perceive social cues and they learn very early in their lives the importance of social acceptance and how to modify their behaviour to fit into a group. A gifted girl's greatest ability is to change her manner and her behaviour to match that of her social group and yet this ability is also her greatest handicap in the development of her abilities.

Silverman (1986) summarises the effects of these characteristics as a blending of both masculine and feminine traits; so that gifted girls have the characteristics, values, attitudes, feelings, goals and expectations of both sexes. The positive result of this combination is that gifted girls are able to achieve highly but on the negative side, they undergo huge internal pressures to perform at a high level in both feminine and masculine domains.

Subsequently, if the roles in each domain are clearly defined and stereotyped, a gifted woman may find it difficult, even impossible, to succeed in one domain without damaging her success in the other.

Ref List:

Kerr, B.A. (1994). Smart girls two: A new psychology of girls, women and giftedness. Dayton, OH: Ohio Psychology Press. Silverman, L. (1986). What ever happened to the gifted girl? In J. Maker (Ed.) Critical issues in gifted education (pp. 43 - 89). Rockville, MD: Aspen Systems. Silverman, L. (1998). Counselling the gifted and talented Denver, CO: Love Publishing. Wolleat, (1979)

Only registered users can write comments.
Please login or register.