Study Points to Dilemmas for the Gifted

A high school exclusively for gifted women would seem to be the ideal milieu for turning out women who are not only high achievers, but who are emotionally prepared for the problems they may face as talented, ambitious women. Many of the graduates of one such school have achieved a great deal professionally and personally. However, much of what they report in a new study reveals the pervasiveness of women’s dilemmas, particularly the way women undervalue themselves and how hard it is for women to balance careers and families.

Researchers at USC have released preliminary results of a study of 1,200 highly gifted women representing several generations in order to see what factors cause some intellectually superior women to fulfill their potential and others not.

All of the women are graduates of Hunter College High School in New York City. Not only is Hunter a school that accepts only students with IQs of 130 or higher, it is a girls’ school.

Numerous studies have found that women who attend women’s colleges develop higher self-esteem and go on to more ambitious careers than women who attend comparable co-ed institutions. Only a pilot project has been completed, but the Hunter research seems to have found this cannot be taken for granted, although the graduates reported that the all-female high school gave them “a heightened sense of personal assertion and the opportunity to compete openly without sexual self-consciousness.”

Nevertheless, the study has projected a sad explanation of why many gifted women may not fulfill their promise, said Tina Freeland, a Ph.D. candidate in the USC School of Education.

Three out of four of the Hunter women, even after being accepted by an extraordinary school, did not believe in their superior intelligence. “Nearly 75% of the women did not consider themselves gifted,” Freeland said, “despite their admission to a highly selective school for the intellectually talented. If women do not recognize their potential, they cannot fulfill it.”

Another significant insight revealed by most of the women in the study was that they considered their greatest obstacle to achievement to be the conflict between their aspirations and motherhood.

The study is being conducted by USC associate professor of education Betty Walker, herself a Hunter graduate. According to Walker, the research, which covers graduates from the 1920s through the 1970s, is the first to examine the factors that affect the educational, vocational and personal development of gifted women.

Most of the women reported that they did not have positive female role models, but wished they had and believed this would make a difference in their lives. As to be expected, there were differences in expectations for different generations. Women who graduated in the 1950s often reported that their parents’ and grandparents’ expectations for them were vague.

In contrast, all of the graduates of the 1960s said that their parents had influenced them to pursue careers, get married and have children. The ‘70s group--graduating in a period of new prominence for the women’s movement--said that their parents urged them to pursue careers, but did not have any explicit expectations that they marry and raise families.

Women of all these periods felt that their high school counseling had not prepared them for the future. Despite being exceptionally promising students in an exceptional school, many said they graduated from high school without any real understanding of the career options open to them.

“Just as important, they left with little appreciation of the conflict they would later face between career and family obligations,” Walker said. “High schools should be counseling girls on this subject, helping them to analyze both the payoffs and the price of having children. The costs of being a working mother are being discussed in the popular magazines, but they’re still not being presented by high school counselors. And unless this kind of counseling happens at the right stage, career-family conflicts will continue to undermine the contributions of future generations of gifted women.”

Walker and Freeland will present the findings on Saturday in Oakland at the national conference of the Assn. for Women in Psychology, and they are seeking funding to complete the research.