Gender and Overconfidence: Effects of Context, Gendered Stereotypes, and Peer Group

Niklas Jakobsson, Minna Levin, Andreas Kotsadam

Norwegian Social Research (NOVA), Oslo, Norway.
Schools for the Future, San Salvador, El Salvador.

DOI: 10.4236/aasoci.2013.32018                

Abstract

Research on Swedish school children has found that boys tend to be overconfident about their grades in mathematics, while girls tend to be underconfident. We find similar results for El Salvadorian children. Mathematics is considered a masculine task and we show that these findings do not carry over to a gender neutral task (social science), where both sexes tend to be overconfident. We find that girls in a single-sex school are more underconfident in their mathematics abilities than girls in a co-ed school, which may suggest that gender stereotypes become reinforced in single-sex environments.

Keywords

Gender, Overconfidence, Peer Group, Stereotype

Conflicts of Interest

The authors declare no conflicts of interest.

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