Our ideas about what is gifted behavior for a boy or for a girl are imbued with society’s notions of appropriate gender identity. Gifted boys and girls need to learn to cope with their giftedness while carefully following prescribed gender roles if they want to avoid the rejection of their communities. How were these gender roles shaped, and how did we get our ideas about what gifted girls and gifted boys should be like? This is the story of how these ideas came to be, how they shape the lives of our bright children and what we can do to help gifted boys and girls break free of the stereotypes and live their own dreams

But perhaps the biggest thing that needs to happen is a gender-free understanding of genius. And also the realization that we all can get there. Given the right opportunities, everyone can build something that helps the world, that solves a problem or that just plain makes money. Men aren’t inherently smarter than women and men aren’t inherently better at startups than women. So let’s stop acting like it

When Cambridge University advised its examiners to avoid words like ‘genius’ and ‘brilliant’ because they exclude women, many of us rolled our eyes and dismissed it as political correctness gone wild. But close your eyes – what’s the first image that comes to your mind when you hear the word genius? Is it Albert Einstein? Stephen Hawking or Srinivasa Ramanujan, perhaps? Shakespeare or Premchand? Steve Jobs? Whether you’re female or male, odds are your mind sees a man.

These associations affect our perceptions of others, which in turn affects their self-image and choices. Gender gap in the sciences, for instance, can be partly explained by the notion that these areas call for ‘genius’ or raw natural ability, which many women don’t feel confident they possess. Reasons for that lack of confidence are also cultural; in the US a depressing piece of research found that even six-year-olds were likely to think of only boys as ‘brilliant’. When professors are rated, it’s men who’re described as stars and visionaries, and the same qualities are overlooked or disparaged in women. Think of the routine putdown ‘hysterical’, which literally means a disorder caused by the womb.

The idea of a lone genius is a Romantic myth; hard work, collaboration and luck have as much to do with accomplishment as ability, and none of these traits are sexual characteristics. Thinking harder about how we fling around words like flair and brilliance might foster a better intellectual climate, all around.

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