Is a Gifted Woman's Experience Different From a Man's?

... and how do the realities of the zeitgeist--the conditions around her at the time--impact the answer?

First of all, this is part of my story and I’ve shared it several times since 2010 and added edits here and there. I’m from the Baby Boomer generation. I was in undergraduate school in Ohio during the years that most schools went from curfews for the girls, skirts (not pants) on campus), and single-sex dormitories … to all the rules changing!

For women: I want intelligent women to write to me with your stories about your own experience of being a gifted woman, identified officially or not, and make sure you let me know what generation you are from. We can weave stories together to share with others. I’ll do the weaving if you send your stories.

And men: Same deal. Send me what it’s been like for you. As an example of zeitgeist, I know how Title 9 affected me; how did it affect you? I was out of school when it went into effect, and I’m athletic, so I was happy to see women were going to get a chance. Roe vs. Wade became the law of the land when I was 24. Now what? And so on …

I hope to publish stories from people of all ages and circumstances. Let me know your age so I can categorize a bit by the historical background of your experiences. You give me permission to use or not use your name. Since you’ll be sending me an email (my first and last name at gmail.com), I can ask for any additional information through that, if needed. I’ve also opened up comments to everyone for this post.

All my work, it seems, has basically been a form of case studies. It helps me to see the complexities better. I look forward to hearing from you. And now, my story.

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What is an intelligent woman?

The answer depends on whom you ask and at what time in her life. I had many assumptions about my future when I was a student at Ohio Wesleyan: I’d become an elementary school teacher, marry, have children, and be a school principal while raising my family.

My plans started well, but unexpected circumstances made my path less direct. Life is a journey and sometimes you change your mind about what you really want to do as you experience more of your life. For intelligent women, as for anyone really, life is more satisfying when we get to follow our passions and use our abilities to our best. Whatever our intellectual profile, we are at our smartest when we do what we were designed to do.

I ended up doing what I love — what I seemed to be made for — but it hasn’t always been clear and I must admit that I stumbled into this. I did indeed teach elementary school, raise a family, and train to be a school administrator.

But when my own three sons, all clearly very bright, experienced difficulties in school, I went back to graduate school and I started to learn everything I could about intelligence: what is it, where does it come from, can you measure it, and how malleable is it (e.g., can parental behavior change a child’s intelligence significantly)? After all, if they were so smart, why were they having any trouble at all in school?

As I learned the answers, I became aware that schools — the usual ways they are set up — don’t meet the needs of many children very well, and this has been the case for a very long time. That partially explained why my own children were having problems.

As I moved farther along in my learning, I saw that it wasn’t as clear whether girls were “suffering” from the way schools work. More boys get into trouble, hated school, and can’t wait to get out, while more girls love school, get good grades, and more frequently feel great about themselves than boys do during the school years.

Although I retired at the end of 2017 from working directly with the families of gifted children, I assessed children and consulted with their parents, so in this post I will talk about women who have children. And I learned a lot from them over the years!

Many people don’t realize that people who marry each other have IQs that are in the same general intellectual range of each other. Basically, they get each other’s jokes and that’s generally an attractive beginning. Their children are also generally only slightly above or below the average of their parents.

My point is this: the mothers of the gifted children are also likely to be smart, gifted women.

Schools seem to fit most girls very well. The problem is that many of our brightest girls actually learn to underachieve — learn less than they could — and develop a number of self-image problems as they go through school.

This is why: Briefly, classrooms at each grade level (usually kindergarten through grade 8) are set up to include equal numbers of boys and girls, children from different economic and ethnic backgrounds, and both the advanced and the struggling learners. The brightest kids get spread out.

David Lohman from the University of Iowa, co-author of both the Cognitive Abilities Test and the Iowa Test of Basic Skills, notes that by first grade the typical same-aged mixed-ability classroom already has 12 grade equivalencies of achievement in it! [1]

What does this mean for a smart girl? She gets to be one of the smartest, best students until she takes ability-grouped classes in high school. Little intellectual competition for eight years can mislead her about her abilities relative to true peers, those with whom she will compete in high school, college, and career.

To further add to her difficulties, the way the smartest children are spread out means that she often doesn’t find another girl who is enough like her to become her soul-mate friend. She doesn’t get used to facing challenging material or practice study skills (she doesn’t need them during those early school years!), and she may fill all of her saved time with “running the school.” At the time, she may feel quite good about that.

Too many of these smart girls end up thinking they are what they do. And when things get more difficult in her advanced courses in high school and college, she starts to doubt she is very smart after all and is often overwhelmed by how much time it takes for studying and schoolwork. She doesn’t want to let go of all her activities, those things that everyone admires in her, and she starts to burn the candle at both ends, and — regrettably — she may start to lower her educational and career expectations for herself.

The smart girl often grows into a smart woman and becomes a wife and mother. Having spent the majority of her childhood being a super-efficient multi-tasker who can do anything, she now thinks she should be able to do everything perfectly in her mother role. The majority of the mothers who come to me as clients already have graduate degrees.

Although a significant number still work outside the home, a substantial number no longer do because their children’s needs require so much of her time and attention. For professionally trained mothers, this puts self-inflicted pressure on them — if they’ve given up their careers for a while — to be the best darned mothers they can be!

Are you starting to see how all this fits together? Women who are capable of earning a college degree often learn from their early school experiences to expect too much of themselves and it leaves them with self-doubt. The irony is that intelligent women are more capable in general than they end up feeling about themselves.

My children were leaving home as I finished my PhD and I still didn’t know how I’d use my degree.

I ran into someone I’d known years ago who expressed disdain for my uncertainty, like, “So, why did you get a PhD if you didn’t know what you were going to do with it?” Of course, it made me feel defensive and not very smart. It didn’t yet occur to me that I could use all I’d learned about intelligence for an actual job or career. And that’s what I did. I turned my huge interest into a career.

And for you mothers of gifted children, there aren’t enough people out here doing what I do, and you might want to consider a career as a high intelligence specialist for your own future.

Although I stopped seeing [most] clients after 2017, I started to tell people I’m an author. All those things I learned along the way, the ups and the downs, opened up my imagination about how I want to spend my still remaining “good years” with good enough health and cogent mind. I love what I do more than ever.

On life’s journey, intelligent women learn that they must be flexible and adaptable so that they will recognize when their true purpose and passion shows up. All your earlier hard work and training feeds into who you are now. None is wasted even if you’ve changed careers or stayed home raising your family. Your next opportunity is still around the corner. The intelligent woman will be open to the possibilities that unfold before her on her own journey.

References

Lohman, D. F. (1999). Minding our p’s and q’s: On finding relationships between learning and intelligence. In P. L. Ackerman, P. C. Kyllonen, & R. D. Roberts (Eds.), Learning and individual differences: Process, trait, and content determinants (pp. 55-76). Washington, DC: American Psychological Association.