Public Acknowledgement as a Double-Edged Sword: Gender Differences in How Publicity Motivates Children and Youths to Achieve Top Performance

Girls and women are disproportionately underrepresented at the top of performance distributions, including in both male- and female-stereotyped fields. Although early-developing gender disparities at the top have been well-documented, little is known about how they develop and the socio-psychological processes that give rise to their emergence. Here, we tested the possibility that social contexts that use publicity as a form of motivation for top performance (e.g., public praise, titles, awards) may contribute to such disparities. Three preregistered experimental studies with elementary-age children, adolescents, and adults (N = 1,518) revealed that by at least middle childhood, (a) boys and men are more willing to publicize their own top than average performance, while girls and women are equally willing to publicize top and average performance; and (b) public acknowledgment of top performance boosts men’s willingness to achieve top performance, but not women’s (and demotivates girls but not boys). Together, these data reveal that a common form of motivation used in the classroom and beyond is systematically more effective for boys and men than girls and women, thus illustrating how socio-psychological processes and modifiable social contexts underlie patterns of female underrepresentation at the top.