Achievement 217Summary
In the first part of the chapter, I examined
a number of individual difference variables
that might explain differences in the nature
of women’s and men’s achievements.
The early work in this area suggested
women have a lower need for achievement
compared to men. This hypothesis was later
dismissed by suggesting that women’s lack
of achievement compared to men’s stems
from women’s “fear of success.” The fear
of success literature was and continues to
be fairly controversial, in part due to the
projective nature of the fear of success
measures. Recent studies, however, suggest
there is still a concern among some women
that success may have negative implications
for relationships. Another reason women
are thought to achieve less than men is that
women have lower levels of self-confidence
compared to men or lower levels of general
self-esteem. Women’s lower self-confidence
and lower self-esteem are limited to certain
circumstances, specifically when the task
is in a masculine domain. Women also
seem to take feedback more to heart than
men, which means that their self-esteem
is affected by others’ positive and negative
evaluations of their performance. In areas
where women are presumed to be inferior
to men, making those stereotypes salient
adversely affects women’s performance. In
regard to self-esteem, it is more accurate to
say men and women have different beliefs
about their strong points and derive their
self-esteem from different sources. Evidence
suggests that men derive self-esteem more
from individuating themselves from others
(i.e., feeling unique in comparison to
others), whereas women derive self-esteem
from their connection to others.
A final individual difference factor
that may have implications for women’sand men’s achievement has to do with
the way they explain their successes and
failures—at least in the area of masculine
endeavors. In those domains, women are
more likely than men to attribute success
to effort or luck (unstable causes), whereas
men are more likely to attribute success to
ability (an internal, stable cause). Women
are more likely to attribute failure to
stable causes, such as lack of ability or task
difficulty, whereas men are more likely to
attribute failure to unstable causes, such as
lack of effort or bad luck. Sex differences in
attributions for performance on feminine
tasks are less clear. Importantly, the different
attributions women and men make for
performance may have implications for
the decisions they make about how hard to
try in an area or even whether to pursue a
particular area of achievement.
In the second half of the chapter,
I explored social factors that might
contribute to women’s and men’s beliefs
about their abilities as well as their
attributions for performance. According to
the expectancy/value model, people pursue
achievement in an area in which they expect
to succeed and they regard as important and
interesting. Whereas expectancies influence
performance, values seem to have a stronger
link to areas that women and men pursue.
Children’s expectancies and values are a
function of gender-role socialization. One
source of socialization is parents. Parents
often have stereotyped views of boys’ and
girls’ abilities, believing boys have greater
math ability and girls have greater verbal
ability, which they translate into beliefs
about their specific sons’ and daughters’
abilities. Parents seem to hold these sex-
differentiated beliefs even when girls and
boys receive the same grades in school. SomeM06_HELG0185_04_SE_C06.indd 217 6/21/11 8:10 AM