When it comes to how society views creativity, there is unfortunately a clear stereotype of who is most creative.
For hundreds of years, men in general have been listed as more creative than women.
This creative stereotype is often based on the fact that throughout history, there have been more examples of famous creative men across science and the arts.
While there are many examples of great creative women today, if we ask someone to think of examples of creative people throughout history, they are likely to come up with names like Albert Einstein, Leonardo DaVinci, Aristotle or Shakespeare.
Creativity throughout history has unfortunately been dominated by men.
But this has less to do with the innate creativity of the genders, and instead on the historical social expectations that women should focus less on their own achievements and instead take care of others, limiting their access to creative jobs, education and recognition.
As a result, there are a lot of biases working against women being seen as equally creative as men, including expectations of what their gender can do, the availability, survivorship and confirmation bias of examples of notable creative men throughout history.
Women are also more likely to suffer from the bias of impostor syndrome than men, limiting their willingness to put their creative ideas out there.
But what does the actual scientific literature which has studied this challenge say about whether there is a gender difference in creativity?
Does research show than men really are more creative than women?
Or are women actually more creative than men?
Fortunately, there is huge amount of scientific research we can look at to get an answer.
Research: Are men more creative than women?
Some individual studies (for example this 2011 study) have indeed shown that men and boys perform better at certain creativity tests, and try therefore to suggest that men are more creative than women.
And a widely cited 2022 meta-analyis of 259 studies of gender differences in creative performance did apparently find support for men being more creative than women. These results should be taken with a heavy grain of salt, as everything from the design of these studies to the definition of creativity they used was inconsistent and could have a large impact on the individual and overall results.
What is a fundamental question which researchers often struggle with is whether creative performance throughout someone’s like (rather than their creative potential) is more driven by nature (the genes someone is born with) or nurture (how they were brought up and their environment).
A review of the literature on gender differences by Abraham (2015) found that the research suggests there does not seem to be a fundamental difference in someone’s creative potential based on the gender they are born with. Nonetheless, as people grow older, there does appear to be evidence showing that men are more likely to achieve higher levels of creative achievement than women. The author came to the following conclusion:
Nonetheless, when taken together though, what the findings suggest is that human beings commence their creative development on a roughly even footing, or at least on one that is not significantly skewed solely as a function of gender. But differences in creative accomplishment begin to surface in young adulthood and are manifest in real world achievements throughout the adult lifespan.
Abraham notes that it is likely sociocultural factors that drive a higher likelihood of men achieving creative success than women do. Societal constraints may include:
- different standards of success for men and women
- women not being allowed to participate to the same degree as men in different spheres of life, and
- active discrimination which negatively impacts access to resources that are essential for achievement in certain fields (which was especially prevalent historically)
Additionally, Abraham also transparently talks about how several studies have shown differences in how different genders approach creative problems and situations. It would be foolish to state that there are no differences between men & women when it comes to not only their creative processes, as well as their creative achievements. After all, the author notes that as we get to examples of creative accomplishment at the top of various domains, across various arts and sciences, there is still today a larger number of men who are recognised for their creative achievements compared to women.
However, this is not because men have a higher capacity to be creative than women.
There is a more recent, much larger new 2024 meta-analysis of the impact of gender on creativity which looked at 753 samples (265,762 individuals), which found that the creative performance of men and women was overall much more similar. This study looked at both aspects of the definition of creativity: that an idea is novel, as well as useful.
What they did find was that men tended to perform better on producing a larger volume of novel ideas (more risk-taking via an agentic tendency), women were more likely to come up with ideas that were more useful (more empathetic via a communal tendency).
Another review of scientific literature by Kaufman and Baer (2011) found that when it comes to creativity test scores between boys and girls, there is no noticeable difference, showing that they have the same creative capacity. In fact, this article notes that there are more studies which show that girls outperform boys on creativity tests than the other way around, which goes against the tendency to believe men are more creative.
The authors note:
Lack of differences between girls and boys, and between men and women, is the most common outcome of the many studies reported above. In some cases, especially in the area of divergent-thinking testing, there are significant numbers of studies in which one group or the other scores higher, but these are generally counter-balanced by studies showing just the opposite. It is unlikely that a meta-analysis would show a significant overall gender difference on these tests, but it should be noted that if there were to be an overall “winner” in the numbers of studies in which one gender outperformed the other, it would be women and girls over men and boys.
In conclusion, results across hundreds of creativity studies show men and women having a much more similar level of overall creativity.
PS. Many thanks to Robyn Bolton for her original article pointing me to the newest meta-analysis.
Creativity & Innovation expert: I help individuals and companies build their creativity and innovation capabilities, so you can develop the next breakthrough idea which customers love. Chief Editor of Ideatovalue.com and Founder / CEO of Improvides Innovation Consulting. Coach / Speaker / Author / TEDx Speaker / Voted as one of the most influential innovation bloggers.
