But later in his article, Vedantam also calls our attention to a puzzling catch. According to Vedantam, Stout and colleagues "found that women ended up with less confidence in their mathematical abilities when their teachers were men rather than women. This happened even when women outperformed men in actual tests of math performance."
Let me paraphrase this puzzling finding. For college women, mathematical competence did not necessarily lead to high levels of confidence in their mathematical ability, despite measured results showing their mathematical ability.
Next, Vedantam reminds us of the puzzling results of a study conducted more than three decades ago. According to him, the study showed that some bright and talented young women "believed they were less gifted than they were. No matter the evidence, they believed they were imposters."
For the sake of discussion, let us say that the young women were intellectually competent but they were not particularly confident in the intellectual competence.
In light of the findings by Stout and colleagues, we can speculate that young women who experience a deficiency in their confidence in the intellectual abilities have not been involved in sufficient same-gender identifications and same-gender intellectual interactions.
If this is indeed truly the case, then the remedy would appear to be to increase the number of same-gender identifications and same-gender intellectual interactions that young women experience in college, especially in math and science.
Now, I want to return to Gopnik's conjecture that top women scientists may withdraw from a competition for resources that they see as systematically unfair. Gopnik's conjecture is understandable. It may even be the case. But her conjecture can be connected with the points raised by Vedantam's article.
In light of Ong's insights, I have suggested that our confidence in our intellectual abilities arises from our same-gender identifications and our same-gender intellectual interactions.
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