TITLE:
Gender and Overconfidence: Effects of Context, Gendered Stereotypes, and Peer Group
AUTHORS:
Niklas Jakobsson, Minna Levin, Andreas Kotsadam
KEYWORDS:
Gender, Overconfidence, Peer Group, Stereotype
JOURNAL NAME:
Advances in Applied Sociology,
Vol.3 No.2,
June
4,
2013
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.