For the John Templeton Foundation, I wrote about the role of self-discipline in educational disparities between genders.
Since at least the mid-2000s, researchers have noted that in North America, girls were consistently averaging better grades than boys in elementary, middle, and high schools — even though achievement and IQ tests suggested that girls and boys had roughly equal abilities. One explanation for this discrepancy was that the tests were systematically underestimating girls’ intelligence, but in a 2006 paper, psychologists Angela Duckworth and Martin Seligman demonstrated that another factor might also be at work: self-discipline. The girls they studied scored higher on measures of self-discipline, which turned out to be a better predictor of grades than intelligence assessments alone.
Supportive skills like self-discipline make a big difference in how individuals learn, and in explaining many educational outcome differences between boys and girls. But could these skills become a liability under certain conditions?