Sex Differences—A Silent Message? A Comparison Study of Parents’ Assessment and Junior High School Student's Self-Assessment of Learning Strengths and Interests

Abstract

The relationship between the self-perceptions of twenty-three Junior High School gifted students from a middle- and upper-middle class socio-economic status community and their parents’ perceptions of learning strengths and interests on a forced-choice “Q-Sort” adapted by the author was examined to determine the effects of parents’ “self-fulfilling prophecies”. Special emphasis was given to correlations by sex of subjects and sex of parents, with particular focus on female subjects. Twenty-eight significant correlations (p = .05 or better) between mothers, fathers, and/or male/female subjects were determined. Results indicate that, despite efforts to avoid sexual stereotyping, parents generally favored “fundamentally male” characteristics for male subjects and “fundamentally female” characteristics for female subjects, while subjects themselves were less stereotypic than parents. A trend toward crossing traditional sex lines is indicated by subjects, leading to the conclusion that the way is open for gifted females to prophesy success for themselves and to reach self-fulfillment of these self-prophecies.