The Psychology of Gender 4th Edition

190 Chapter 6

TAKE HOME POINTS

■ People who have a fear of success are capable of high

achievement but associate negative consequences with

achievement.

■ The basic concern is that achievement is inconsistent

with the female gender role. Females are concerned

that attaining high levels of achievement will have

social costs.

■ The fear of success literature was, and still is, quite

controversial. There is concern with the validity of the

projective tests that were first used to identify a fear of

success in women. However, self-report instruments still

show that women more than men associate success

with negative consequences.

■ Some women who start out in traditionally masculine

fields leave those domains for more traditionally femi-

nine pursuits. Further research with these women will

tell how much of this change is due to a fear of success

versus a concern with the demands and lack of flex-

ibility of a traditionally masculine career.

Self-Confidence

Do women have less confidence in themselves

compared to men? Despite the fact that girls

do better than boys in school, girls are more

worried than boys about their grades in school

(Pomerantz, Altermatt, & Saxon, 2002). That

is, females earn higher grades in most sub-

jects in school but evaluate their competence

in each of those subjects as lower than that

of boys—with the exception of language.

Interestingly, women will defend other wom-

en’s abilities but not necessarily their own.

Collis (1991) refers to this as the “We can but

I can’t” paradox. In general, women are more

likely than men to underestimate their abili-

ties and less likely to expect success. What are

the consequences of a lack of self-confidence?

masculine fields; and third, women had low

intrinsic interest in the value of physical sci-

ences (Frome et al., 2006). Female engineer-

ing students expressed a number of concerns

about their future careers, including conflict

between work and family, lack of female role

models, lack of confidence, and discrimina-

tory attitudes (Hartman & Hartman, 2008).

Those who expressed greater concerns in

their senior year of college also anticipated

that they would be less likely to be working

in the field of engineering 10 years later. Find

out on your own why women (and possibly

men) switch from nontraditional to tradi-

tional majors with Do Gender 6.2.

DO GENDER 6.2

Reasons for Switching from

Nontraditional to Traditional Majors

Conduct interviews with both women and

men who switched from nontraditional to

traditional majors and from traditional to

nontraditional majors. First, you will have

to decide what the traditional majors for

men and women are. For example, you

might find five women who switched from

science, math, or engineering to nursing,

and five men who switched from the liberal

arts to business. To gather more data on

this issue, this could be used as a class proj-

ect with the interview format standardized.

Ask a series of open-ended ques-

tions to find out why people initially chose

their major, why they switched, if they had

any difficulties switching, and how others

reacted to their switch. Then, you might

follow up with some closed-ended ques-

tions to make sure the issues you are inter-

ested in are addressed. For example, you

might have some specific statements about

negative peer reactions or fears of negative

consequences associated with success.

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