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Abstract

The present study investigates possible strategies for closing the gender gap in science fields by increasing girls’ persistence. Prior work has found that asking girls to pretend play as a competent character increases their ability to persist in a difficult or boring task (White et al., 2017). In this study, we aim to explore if asking children to pretend play as a dedicated scientist, versus a brilliant scientist, boosts their persistence when doing science, in this case, playing a science game. Past studies suggest girls begin to internalize gender stereotypes about brilliance around the age of 6 (Bian et al., 2017), thus we chose to collect data from children who are six and seven years old. The results (N = 111) found that for girls, pretending to be either a brilliant or dedicated scientist significantly promoted their science engagement. However, girls’ persistence in the brilliance condition was not significantly different from their persistence in the dedication condition, indicating that the characteristics of the role model do not affect girls’ persistence. These findings provide hopeful insights on increasing girls’ persistence in STEM at a young age, which could help increase female representation in science fields.

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