26: Celebrating Smart Girls in the 21st Century

for listening and enjoy the podcast. I'm so excited to have Barbara Kerr on the podcast today, a distinguished professor of the University of Kansas and author of the book Smart Girls in the twenty first Century, Understanding Talented Girls and Women, co authored with Robin McKay. Barbara, it's so awesome to be able to talk to you today. I'm really glad to talk to you. It's not often that I get to talk about my book with the author one of my favorite books. I'll seve it. You made

me blush. Oh gosh, I was wondering why did you write this book. I mean, there's a long history of this book, right this is the second edition, so goodness, it's not even the second edition. It's actually a completely new book. There were three editions of the first book, and it was just kept in print for twenty years, and so you know, with revisions. But this is entirely new,

every single word. But you want to know the history, right, Yeah, So it started with my being selected to be a kid going to a special school for get to kids during the Sputnet era. We were told that we were the leaders of tomorrow. In fact, our teacher told us that the Russians and Chinese were training their children to take over the free world and it was our job to stop them. Yeah, but that was the only other pressure, no crusher at all. I feel like, did you personally

like conceptualize yourself as a gifted child. Well, you know, people that always told me I was smart. I read very early, and I uh, I loved science from the time I was a little bitty. My dad was an engineer who was had the opportunity to work with the Atomic Energy Commission, and so my dad came home every day and talked about his work with me when I was this little thing. You know, he would talk about

atoms and talk about stars. My first science project he helped me with when I was like seven, was the evolution of a star. And so, yeah, I had some notion that I was smart because people had said so more people said I was weird than said I was smart. Basically, I was a very weird little girl. Yeah, and as we know, that's a characteristic of creativity. Well, yeah, being different. But you know, you know what it's like when you're little. You don't know what's coming in your future. All you

know is that you're different. And it was years later that I learned that that was a good thing. But anyhow, so I'm in this Spotnet class right and they and I was very lucky, you know, especially after I read your book about what it was like to want to be able to get to class, not to be able to do well. I'm your evil twin. I got to be in the class. And we had we had French. We learned to speak French fluently, which has been great for me, but they told us it was because that

was the language of civilization. And we learned speed reading because President Kennedy was a speed read and I'm telling you that's kind of andy. No matter what people tell you about speed reading and how it doesn't work and so on, it sure worked for me. And then we had very advanced algebra and advanced sciences. It was a superb education. We did four hours of homework a night. I mean, I remember crying because I couldn't get through all my homework and I was so tired, So that

part of it was really difficult. But being able to be stimulated like that and never be bored was pretty wonderful. Yeah, I imagine I have to imagine. Yeah, you know, how did these early experiences influence your consceptulations of what it means to be smart? Well? I think that that they influenced me first too, in the early part of my career,

to maybe take IQ intelligence testing too seriously. When I wrote the first Smart Girls, I pretty much defined gifted as you know hi IQ like everybody else did in the nineteen eighty That's how I've been identified by Stanford Benet Test. I'm glad to give me the risk of a bond because of the spatial visual stuff. But as my career continued, I began seeing many examples of people who were achieving extraordinary things without having been labeled as gifted,

and I began to wonder what was going on. I also noticed that the most marginalized people were the ones that I found the most interesting, whereas the gifted kids were usually the popular kids. You know, in high school. I liked the weird ones. You a great you know, relate to what you just said that you have a great quote in your book. We believe there are smartles in every classroom whose capacity and desire to learn are overlooked and go unnoticed simply because they don't fit their

society's image and their particular school's definition of giftedness. I thought we could talk about some of your own personal conceptualizations of what it means to be a smart girl. What does it mean to be a smart girl? It's something that's beyond just high IQ. Is that great? It? Yes? I really believe though, that being smart does involve being able to catch on quickly, make sense of things, and to know what to do about it. Okay, However, there

are so many combinations of abilities that go overlooked. The huge emphasis in the schools is on verbal and mathematical ability, where there are plenty of kids who catch on make sense of things and know what to do about music, and who catch on makes sense to things and know what to do with spatial visual sorts of things, and they can easily be overlooked. That's some of these abilities.

What are some abilities to get overlooked? Well? Case of creativity is what continues to amaze me because I've work now every Friday with a group of ten to twelve young people who've been selected by a technique we've developed called Profilely, where we identify sixteen year old young people who match the characteristics of eminent people have different domains when they were sixteen years old. You can't look for a sixteen year old creative kid by comparing them to

an adult or to adult. You've got to you've got to look for what was you know, what we're great writers doing at sixteen, and believe me, they weren't writing novels. They were getting in trouble for their humor and vice versa. Adult passion can rarely match the passion of a child. That's right. So it makes no sense to me to stry to find creative young people with the current techniques.

The biggest problem we have is that although not all creative people fit this profile, we know that first of all, creative people are open to experience, and that many are

lower in conscientiousness and for females, lower in agreeability or agreeableness. Now, what that means is that they don't match teachers' conceptions of what a gifted kid are if you're a kid who's mind is always wandering and you know you have this bit bit imagination, but you also are a little prickly or a little unusual, or you're not the typically the child that most teachers typically like, which is the extroverted, conscientious industries child. Yes, yeah, yeah, it's a really good point.

And the conscientious you know, what do you do with like the introverted? The introverted child, you know, often a lot of their their talents and abilities just won't be seen at all. Right, so right, how in the world do you what what kind of system can you put in place so they don't fall between the cracks. Well, in the part of the book where I talk about finding smart girls, right, I talk about looking around the classroom and not just looking for this smiling girl with

her hand up. Yeah she's probably smart too, But you need to look for the tangle haired girl in the back who's doodling in the margins of her notebook. You need to look for the girl who's hiding a book in her notebook and reading it secretly. And those are often the girls that are overlooked. Also, girls who are

not attractive are overlooked. Yeah. Ever since Urman made the statement that gifted girls were taller, stronger and taller, stronger and healthier than average girls, people have assumed that gifted girls are always you know, you know, beautiful, healthy, tall, strong,

and that's just really not the case. In fact, being an unattractive girl gives a girl an opportunity and opportunities spend some time alone, whereas the very attractive, extroverted girl is more likely to be absorbed into girls peer culture. Very interesting, which is poison, basically very interesting. I mean you you you kind of know, you're not kind of you do? You integrate lots of different fields, you integrate.

I mean, you've done a lot of work. You've done work in gender studies, right, it's as well as intelligence and creativity. And you're I mean, you're basically the modern day Hollingsworth. Right. Well, in my first laboratory, which was at the University of Nebraska, my last day there, my lab staff and my graduate students and I went to lead a Hollingworth's grave and drank champagne. You are the modern day She really does mean a lot to me.

She really is a model in many ways, She's a model because she was a great scientist, a great research and yet she also her science was infused with compassion and love for the kids. And that is so evident from your work as well. You know, I want to I want to just just think critically for a second about about the opposite of smart girls. I mean, does that that means that means there are not smart girls? Yeah? Yeah, so you're you're, you're just you're just saying that's the truth.

And you know, we you know, we should try as hard as possible to to cast a wide net. But that doesn't mean that every every single person is of equal smartness, right right. In fact, cast a white net is the exact phrase that I've used. We have to cast white nets. Some people would say it's controversial, right, No, I imagine individual differences being controversial. I mean, no, not everybody is smart, and not everybody is tall. You know, whenever the principal says to be all of our child

group gift that I say, are they all tall? You know, it's just we can't deny that there are individual differences. But we shouldn't just be looking at one curve of just intelligence scores. We also agree that intelligence develops in a way that has more flexibility than height timings of yeast timing. Yeah, so I really believe that that intelligence and creativity, emotional intelligence, that these characteristics that are so valuable in humans, that are distributed across the normal curve.

I really do believe though, that from pre natal times, that heredity and environment are in a constant dance with one another, right, And that's certainly what the science suggests. Yeah, it seems it seems that there's more and more evidence that even though we really need to respect the impact of our genes, we have to recomment. We have to understand that the environment can either encourage or crush these

traits that we that are so very important to human society. Well, since you brought that up, I wanted to ask you, what are some of you you have talked in your book about some of the barriers that Smarco's face to being able to express that all sorts of things, from stereotype threat to all sorts of things. I don't want to, like,

you know, say it. I want you to talk a little bit about something Little Girls and the Princess industrial Complex, because you go all the way through to adolescence to adulthood, it's really great. Yeah, way to elderly years. And for little girls, what's holding them back, I think is the fact that parents go along with girls gender role rigidity. All kids who are little are gender role nazis, I mean all of them, boys and girls. But that doesn't mean that we have to encourage every girl to be

a princess. Some girls don't want to wear princess clothes, and for some that glitter phase is a passing phase. But when mothers get wrapped up in it themselves and vicariously live out their prom queen dreams through their daughters, that's that's an awful thing, because princess is not a career, and and a princesses is somebody who has to be rescued and take yourself. Okay, there's a fear, So I think it starts with that. And then in the adolescent years.

In the adolescent ears, you have the very early sexualization of girls. Would you know, did you see that part where I talked about how much earlier puberty comes. Yeah, it's as strong implications, tremendous implication. Ye, for the education, that's right. Yeah, remember what jicksent Mahi found in his

study of all the creative creative people. He studied that the later the onset of of romance and sexual behavior, the later the onset of that kind of engagement, the more likely a person was to become creatively accomplished, so that delaying sexual activity is critical to later accomplishment. Oh, that explains my accomplishments. Then you look at you, Hey, look at me. I was such a herd. He's so long, you know, to get a boyfriend. But you know, I mean,

I'm not doing bad. I'm not doing bad, but I'm just saying, uh, you know, priorities, pies. You know, we're both doing great now. And that's what people don't understand is that we don't rush into romantic relationships. Well, allow time for our own dreams to thrive, you know, before we become a culture of two. Absolutely. Can you explain the beehive metaphor? Ai? Yes, Well, oh my gosh, my publisher made me change drone to inseminator or something. I

don't know. They didn't like that word. But I'll say why I used the beehive metaphor, and that is that the beive is a great image for understanding all the types of giftedness and girls. I think we can use it with gifted kids in general, but I like it as a metaphor for girls because the worker these are your basic high IQ kids, your terminent type of kids.

They're the people who are real smart, and they generally are conscientious, and they usually have some social skills just like term and found and they go on to become our experts, our professionals, you know, our lawyers, our doctors, all the people who keep society going by doing expert work. And that's the majority of our kids. But then there's that very special uh part of the highs that I

call the honey bees in hide. Those are the ones that stay in high and nurture the the next generation and uh there, And so the hunt bees are those girls with emotional intelligence. They usually combine high. So the high IQ that used to be thought of as being the only thing now has, you know, is challenged by the fact that emotional intelligence does seem to overlap intelligence.

But that be the same thing. So those girls is the ones who have extraordinary skills for understanding their own feelings and those of others, and for managing their own emotions and those of others. That's the honey bees. And then that player of my favorite is the drones, and yeah, the publisher made me change it to fertilizer or something.

I don't know, but I like drones because that was the word for female high creatives and I liked it because treatently gifted women tend to be pretty androgynous, have a lot of what are traditional masculine characteristics, and creative men have a lot of traditionally feminine characteristics. I'm not saying them in masculinity is real. I'm saying their social roles, and we tend to see that, so I don't having a problem calling them drones or dronets. But the creative

ones are when you add too intelligence. Now you add some specific intellectual abilities that you write about much better than our be able to write about, because whether we talk about that additional capacity for divergent thinking, but that's in addition to the sort of base ability. But then there's also creative literature. People have openness to experience it.

The more I delve into it, and I read everything the column, the young rise the more I delve into it, and I'm beginning to really believe that openness to experience is really describing a very different mode of perception. Yeah, what do you very different? Do you think like an

altered state of consciousness? Yeah, I think that people when we look at the correlations of openess to experience and absorption, and we've got when six hundred cases now that I'll be hoping to publish soon where we're looking at the incredible correlation of various facets of goodness to experience with absorption. In fact, absorption which is the capacity to alter consciousness deliberately,

it's took to the type of attentional deployment. When when we look at that, it's really, uh, it's really amazing how different the perception and the way of thinking. The start of thinking is that people are who are high in an absorption. What you've talked about mind wandering seems to be very ristic of people of high absorption. And I also really have become attached to Colin Deyong's work that shows that you can be a little too open new experiences. You can help them. Oh man, what reason?

Oh no, god, they're not like you. I mean, you know when to say, you know, when you say okay, like this is just nuts. They don't. I mean people in say ninety percent heal that we meet. They believe anything. They believe in UFOs. They you know, like you know, UFOs are coming. They believe in you know, numeralogy. They're into astrology because they're so vulnerable to anything that promises to kind of take them into an altered state. Right, right,

you can be too open to experience. And there's a sweet spot, we think right around the ninety fifth percentile. I know that sounds really high, but think about it. It's just you know, we're you know, we're talking about the difference from scare deviations between ninety fifth and ninety nine, and ninety nine seems to be a problem for a lot of people with ninety fifth. Wow, you need to get a lot done. Yeah, no, I definitely hear you.

I you know, I wish there are more non self report measures of openness to experience because a lot of the stuff, you know, there's a ceiling. I'm sure, Well there's that. Oh I wish I had it ready in hand. But there has been a new parental a parental behavioral observation that's being developed right now that observes the behaviors associated with openness to experience as well as the other neo five factors. That's kind of exciting. It's about time

that we went there. That's cool. Please send your link to that. Well, you know, there was that one of their categories, the queens, the royal bees, and that I have to account to the fact that there are people who are extremely high in absorption, very very bright, very very creative, who become great leaders. But they also tend to be mystics profits people who are more than creative. They are they have a sense of interconnectedness with others in a way. They look like what Maslow was calling

self actualized people. And the females that are like that, like Helen Keller, Eleanor Roosevelt and a number of you know, religious mystics, and and people who are great spiritual leaders. They don't look like your basic gifted girl, right. They look different. Yeah, I know that's very interesting. Do you think that they're still they should still be recognized as as you know, give them in the Optimal to you talk about optimal development in your book. I really love

love that phrase. Yeah, optimal. Yeah, I think they need to be found it. So often the kids who have these extraordinary abilities will be seen as so odd that they might be misdiagnosed as being you know, autistic or schizophrenic, because you know, like Bernadette of Lords, they have visions when they're little, and when you're little, you don't have much of a way of understanding the difference between an altered state and reality, or the difference between dream and

mind wandering. You don't have that ability. So these kids can really struggle with their visions. You can see, I'm really influenced at the time I spent with Native American people, right, because those are the skills and valued by Native American people with the use of some substances as help sometimes. Yes, you know, you's see way I said, our society's clumsy way of attaining altered states is through the use of

mind altered and substances. Absolutely. So you have this CLEOS Center where you are the director of Project CLEOS, and I thought that you could talk a little bit about you know, it stands for Counseling Laboratory for the Exploration of Optimal States. Yes, I wonder if you talk a little about how you select people for this program and what are some of the things you do to help support them in their optimal development. Well, the first thing I should tell you is that even though we do

use an identification procedure, we also take walk ons. I believe with all my heart in taking walk ons, because if a parent tells me their adolescent is creative, or an adolescent comes to me and says, you know, I really want to be a writer, and I didn't get into your program, but I really like to come, believe me, I get them in there. Yeah, so that's great. Oh man,

we've got to have walk ons. I could go on a whole riff about how gifted education should be like an athletic team where you can walk on if you didn't, you know, get identified. But anyhow, clecos as I said before, we profile creative students. We send out five profiles as well as a general profile of creative people. What are

the profiles? The profiles are arts, design, architecture, and it's spatial visual what people like that like at sixteen, and then they're yes, there's a verbal what writers looked like at sixteen, and then there's We found our factory analysis and our cluster analysis showed that interestingly, musicians don't tend to cluster with the artists. They tend to be more

similar in personality interests and values. To other performers and to even to debaters, they're more similar to people who do other sorts of work in front of people, expressing

in front of people. The other categories are emotional intelligence, interpersonal creativity we call it, and then we have a scholarly inventive category for makers, you know, for young people who from an early age we're putting things together a little different from the two D spatial visualizing that we found that people who are likely to become creative engineers are somewhat different from people who well, actually quite different from people who become fine artists. So we need to

make that distinction. What about creative engineers versus non creative engineers are what do they look like as a difference. Well, non creative engineers are worker bees, they're experts. They're people who are really good at figuring out whether a particular material can be used in a particular way because of its properties, and so they are the experts that help us make the things that we make. But the creative engineers the person who designs a new product or process

that's never been seen before. Yeah, that's not too easy to do, is it. They're basically the inventors, inventors and Scott. That's why, in addition to Clius, I co founded the Maker Space here in Lawrence because we realized that these kids are so underserved, and I'm talking about adolescents and young adults are so underserved. The ones who have inventive ideas, they've had so little opportunity in high school to design their ideas and to learn about how you take an

idea from vision to commercialization. So we're working really hard to help to help people to do that at the Makerspace. That's wonderful. And you incorporate this idea of the Steam movement into this, right, I mean the honor of being on a panel if you remember at APA a couple

of years ago. Yeah, yeah, very much. So. The Steam movement is is it really overlaps with the maker movement because most inventors today, Most inventors have to combine an artistic sensibility, or at least an artistic sense of an elegant solution with scientific abilities. Did you know that when I interviewed Steve Bosniak for my Inventor study that he told me he would never have been able to invent the Apple computer if his parents hadn't fought for him

to be able to take an electronics course. Oh wow, that's so interesting. Yeah. He said that he was in the math gifted program and when he was working on circuits or as he called them, breadboards, trying to get as many circuits as possible on to as small space as possible. But he realized that he needed to learn how solder, you know, he needed to really know how

electricity works and work with his hands. But when he asked, the school said he couldn't take electronics because that was a shop course and that was for the lesser able kids, for the non gifted. In other words. Wo yeah. So his parents raised a ruckets about that and really supported him, and I think they went all the way up to the Board of Education and got special permission for him to be dual enrolled in the gifted program and the

voke edburg that's of reverse reverse gifted. Yeah. Fighting, you know, usually parents don't fight the other way. Yeah, well sometimes they do. Yeah, it's going to be an event. You've got to know how to make stuff. You have to know how materials help materials work. You need to know how electricity works. And it's not enough just to know the theory. You've got to get your hands in there and you can get a few electric shocks. Actually you need to know how to do that. And for girl

inventors cktor smrtils. One of the things we find with our highly creative girl inventors is that they've had fewer opportunities than the boys have to mess around with materials to construct things, to design things with their hands, because girls toys tend to be predesigned. You know, you don't get to use your imagination, but also don't get to use your hands as much. That's very interesting. You know, you're raising a lot of issues that I haven't considered fully,

So this is really helpful. Oh good. What does it mean to be a girl in the new millennium? You talk You asked that question in the book and then answer it. Well, it's so different. We mentioned I talked to you earlier about the fact that puberty comes so much sooner for millennial girls and that that's a trap.

But there are other issues too. Both parents are working for vast majority of bright girls, and generally when mom is working, it falls to the oldest girl or all the girls to pick up the domestic chores, particularly in families that are below the median income where they can't afford the extra house. You know, sure lawyers, female lawyers, and physicians can afford women to clean their house, but what does the house cleaner do for childcare? She has

her older siblings taking care of the younger siblings. Now that's really cutting into smart girls time to read, time to develop. So for girls, teenage girls and even girls younger than teens bear a disproportionate amount of the household chores in these times in which both mom and dad have to work, and sometimes they work multiple jobs. The parents, so the kids are doing laundry, childcare, fixing meals. One little girl, I know her native of her parents gets

home till after midnight, so after school. From the time she was ten, she's had to take care of her little sister who is an infant, and now her little sister is seven, but she still makes all the meals, make sure she does her homework. Can you imagine how that's cutting into her time? Of course, of course, so that premature adult responsibilities is difficult for Leno girls. Yeh

can see that. You might think that for the upper middle class and upper class girls that it's different and it is in that it's not chores that are keeping them busy. It's an endless round of social activities. Girls are overscheduled more so than bokeets and different things, right, yeah, my gosh. Yeah. The most common things we see girls being overscheduled in such things as cheerleading. We know where they end up. They end up making thirteen dollars an

hour at the post for a professional team. You know, I was. I was a cheerleader in college, but they didn't pay much. I didn't get fit anything, I see. I was so bad they made me the school mascot instead. Oh, they run around in the heat outfit. What was your mascot? It was a Scottie dog. Okay, that's perfect, And I wish I could see that pictures. Hey, I'm too clumsy, even though I'll show you someday. You're too clumsy to be a what I was too clumsy to be a cheerleader.

I got hit by a car when I was fourteen years old. And I'm laying there in the in the in the post op. You know, all my bones are broken, my back is sprayed, and I mean, you know, two broken wrist, two broken ankles. You know what The first thing is I said to my parents when I came back to consciousness, I said, does this mean I can drop out of cheerleader's claw? Yeah, that's how much I hated it. But not all girls hated Some girls like it,

and if they like it's super. But but the trouble is is that gifted girls who are in upper middle class families, suburban families are are really peer pressured and mom pressured and even dad pressured into these activities that have no career path whatsoever, and and and that's one of them. But they're also the peer group, you know, insists that they play a number of sports that don't have a particular future for them or where there's very

few scholarships. So they're getting tracked into no future at extracurricular activities. And most adolescent gifted girls are smart girls are incredibly overscheduled. And the ones that resist that get get a lot of flack about that because being pretty unpopular is still really really important if you're smart. Yeah, yeah, now, these are really important considerations. Yeah, you talk, I mean, you take you you tackle lists at various angles all

throughout the development. You say, you know, there are some specific issues and adolescence with identity development. Is that right? Yes? I think you know, we all know a lot about stereotype threat now, and I think it's very very powerful research. And we need to understand that the stereotype threat, I mean,

my listeners might not know what it is. Okay, Well, stereotype threat is, uh, what happens when you are about to engage in a task and you're reminded in even the most subtle way that you're a member of a particular group. For instance, it's been found that even writing your name and your gender before taking a mathematics test, being reminded that you're a girl can make you underachieved compared to boys, because girls aren't supposed to be as

good at math, although of course they are. They close the gap entirely being reminded of you of your group. African American kids who are about to take almost any kind of intelligence test, who are reminded that even the most subtle ways of their status as an African American whill underperform. So stereotype threat is very powerful. But we also have to understand that stereotype threat can also be undone and unlearned. That's right, So that in my book,

I talk about how important it is to say to girls. Yeah, there's people who will say that girls can't do this as well as boys, But actually that's wrong. That research is you know, the research show that girls can do it as good as boys, and I know that you can, so that we can undo that really quickly and intensely if we are very deliberate about it. So yeah, very type threat is major. Yeah, because you talk about minority smart goals. Right. Oh, how does privilege play a role

in in everything you're talking about? Well, as you know, I have old chapter on privilege because privileged gender and talent are intertwined. I mean by privilege, could you unpack it? Well, privilege is any special is any special head start that you get by being in a status that's more favored by your society. Now, there's many different kinds of privilege. The one we've heard about most lately is white privilege, and that's probably the most sillient privilege there is in

American society at least. And there's masculine privilege or male privilege. There's heatero s privilege, there's pretty privilege, in other words, attractiveness, beautiful, pretty people from the get go, have a head start in life. I also brought up ones that we often don't think about, like geographical privilege. It matters where you're born and raised, It matters where you live right now in the United States, it matters where you live in

the world, So geographic. So there's all these forms of privilege, right, and there's all these forms of powerlessness, and they interact with gender, and they interact with talent. The lower you are in privilege, the more distant you are from the center of power in your society, the farther you will have to travel to get to that center. Right you you called distance to privilege. You've created a scale, is

that right? A distance to privilege scales. That was a scale that that where it's people are allowed to self report, so they report how distant they feel on all of these things. And it's worded like this. With regard to attractiveness, on this ladder, we show them a little ladder how how how close are you to the bottom of society or society's most desirable ideal form of attractiveness versus up at the top society's ideal version. We have the same

with race, gender, religion, geography. You know, the whole thing. And what we find is that what really matters with regard to privilege is one's own subjective perception of it.

Like it's just dumb to say to somebody you're not you don't like privilege because you were born in this way, or you know you don't you know you have bloody money, any or or other like privilege because you know I was brought up Again, it doesn't matter with the objective facts are what really matters in determining a bright girl's identity and her beliefs in what she's able to do. What matters is how far she feels from privilege. Let's

your self perception of privilege. That's very interesting. So you could technically be not in a position or be in a position of privilege, but not think you are right. You could be, for instance, you could be a white

a white upper class girl. If you perceive yourself as being fat and ugly, then you will believe that a lot of opportunities are closed to you that actually aren't, or if you are are you are a girl from a family that makes fifty thousand a year that's above the media income, but you were growing up in Scottsdale or Beverly Hills. You're surrounded by people who make millions, then you're actually not poor before you're going to feel poor by social comparison. So that's why that perception is

so important. The more we feel we lack privilege, the more distant we feel from privilege, the less we believe that we can achieve, and the less we believe that we can accomplish unless somebody gives us social capital. Yes, that's the other side of it. That's what we need to do for girls who lack privileges. Provide the social capital, in other words, the networking, the relationships, as well as the material resources that they need to get to where

they're going to be. So privilege, talent, and gender all work together to predict right. Can I thrown another thing into the mix, into another variable? Yeah? Sure, passion? Well you know I have a whole chapter on that too. I'm trying to set you up. Yeah, thank you out like you that's also important inaction, right, like you've got.

I believe it's absolutely it's the fire. If if gender and talent and privilege are essentially what are setting the course of the missile, then it's the passion that lights the fire. Now, I looked at lots of different ways of looking at passion, and I settled upon a classic one, and that was Paul Torrance's idea of falling in love with an idea. I wanted that because I wanted it to be clear that this is not passion that's merely high energy. You can be a driven, high energy person

and not really have a passion at all. It's having fallen in love with an idea that gives you a sense of purpose and meaning. Yes, And did you notice that I also talk about how that enables women to leap frog right over privilege of lack of privilege, that it makes them fearless, it makes them seek out the social capital, it makes them jump over the barriers, you know. And in my first Smart Girls, where I had to, you know, I read the biography's eminent women, and back

then there were hardly any. And that's how old I am. But one thing that I noticed is that when I was talking about people like Marie Cure and Simonda Bovoire and Margaret Mean, they didn't seem to notice sexism. They didn't seem to notice that people were trying to stop them. When people did try to discriminate against them. They just kind of looked at them like what It just absolutely ignored discrimination and sexism. And that's what a passion will

do for you. People want to try to discriminate you against you, and you just go, well, no, you're not going to stop me, right. I mean, you've criticized grit and you talk about it a a little bit the book What's difference between grit and because Angel Duckworth, who studies grit, defines grit as passion and perseverance for long term goals, but which I think is great. But here's the problem

with how grit has been interpreted. It has been interpreted as simply being similar to industrious disaccountanciousness, right, and how it's measured in the grit scale, there's not much passion in the grit scale. Yeah, It's like it's such a problem because we find that creative people are selectively gritty. They will show a lot of passion and perseverance in

their music, for instance, and blow off everything else. And when we look at eminent people, you'll see that none of them have grit and persevere except in their domain. Usually because if you have GrITT and perseverance, it nearly almost everything that you do. Then you're so perfectionistic that you don't really do anything really well. And the reason that I take on grit so much love Angelo, by the way, but I take on the concept, and that

is because grit conscientiousness are gendered ideas. You see, men are gritty, but females so, you know, men are supposed to be tough and gritty and to persevere no matter what. But females are supposed to be conscientious in all things, to have neat handwriting, to finish every task on time, to be you know, to be punctual. And they get reinforced for that. Well that looks like that looks like they have a passion, but actually they're just scared to

death of not pleasing somebody else. And so yeah, it's like duty. Yeah, it's like a duty is. Yeah, it's beautifulness and it might even look like passion if the kid is may have high energy level and be driven. So I see, I think you could be driven. I have high energy, be just plugging away with all your might, but not really have an idea that you're in love with except pleasing your tiger mother. Yeah, that's a good point. That's a good point to something really important to keep

in mind. Yeah, so I think I'm all for grit, but only select grit. In fact, I teach my creative kids very clearly that I say, Look, if anybody ever tells you that anything that's worth doing is worth doing well, anybody who says that is lying, because if you attempt to do everything well, you will never be able to put the energy that you need to put into your creative idea. I have to got to let some stuff go. You got to disappoint some people. Yeah, it's good to

fail a little bit. Girls have got to learn disappoint other people. They've got to learn to let people down. They've got to learn how to be late. They've got to learn how to I've got to learn that too. Yeah. Hell yes, Because because females are trying to be everything to everybody, are never ever going to accomplish anything. That's a good point. I think that that's that applies to both smart boys and smart girls, and as well as un smart boys and unsmart girls. Well, Scott, I just

think you're real wealth socialized. I think you've been real well socialized. I think a lot of times, a lot of times when boys are sloppy, are late, are rambunctious. They're just being boys, right, But when girls are careless and late and sloppy with things and only devote themselves to their writing or their music, and they're considered to be re really combating or going to war with the

feminine gender role, and there's a lot of punishments for that. Ye, your group, it's really good, good stuff to keep in mind. Can you give some advice to parents and educators on how what are some early signs of giftedness of a smart of being a smart girl that they could work out for Well, a girl who catches on fast, makes sense of things and knows what to do about it.

And that's why I said that if you're a you know, if you're a parent of a little girl and you guys have just moved to the United States and your little girl learned English in one year, she's gifted. I don't care what the iq T just say, that's pretty amazing. So we, you know, we have to look for behaviors that show that they learn rapidly and well, and and particularly that they're learning rapidly and well in something they

really really care about. These are skills as well, that can be learned and everyone to some more well, you know, the old idea that intelligence can be learned. I think it can be modified upwards. Bye bye. I think that you can increase your capacity to learn by continuing learning, by reading everything, dreamason and and by learning loss of languages and learning music and all that sort of thing.

I do think there's a range I think, and I think that things like working memory are pretty hard to change and might not even be worth anybody's time to dry probably more meaningful things, which which does take you to a point of your book that I like, you know, you ask, well, what is the goal of all this intense preparation that begins as early as elementary school? And you're you propose a new model of development in your book.

What do you think, you know, once we identify smart girls, or we identify the you know, what should we do with that challenge the heck out of them for one purpose? For that purpose, I just think that that first we challenge them to learn the basic things that that that everybody needs in our society, of course, but then we need to take them way beyond being you know, being competent. I think that that to instill a love of reading and help them to learn to read above their level.

I think that we need to. It's so obvious, isn't it that we need to let them learn at their own case and not hold them back and not insist that they stick around UH to help the other children. I think that we need to. So part of challenging them is UH is not putting them in charge of helping and collaborating with other kids, so they do all the work right. So that's that's very I think the first we have to challenge them after we find them.

Then we challenge them, and gradually, as their interests developed, we begin to challenge them more in the specific domains that they're most interested in. I think we're turning out way too many generalists, and so many things that kids want to do today are going to require such an early start that if a girl has an early interest in mathematics, why shouldn't she be able to specialize while she's still in middle school. Everybody says, oh, just let

her explore. What if she doesn't want to, It's like, you know, have will be just you know, good at everything. But except I think that it's okay to be stellar in a specific area and to be just you know, good at the others challenge. Yeah, that's a great message to end on. Thank you Barb for all the really important work you do for the smart and I'm smart men and women, boys and girls out there, and for

talking to me today. And thank you Scott for opening up my mind with Unngifted and thanks for getting it published while I was still writing Smart Girls so I can read it. Thanks for listening to The Psychology Podcast with doctor Scott Barry Kaufman. I hope you found this episode just as an informative and thought provoking as I did. If you'd like to read the show notes for this episode or here past episodes, you can go to the Psychology Podcast dot com.