Re-examining gender bias in achievement attributions

Abstract

Male-favouring and female-derogating causal attributions for achievement outcomes are often cited within the social psychological literature as evidence for the “ultimate attribution bias”. However, most of the studies documenting this attributional pattern were conducted over 20 years ago. This study examines whether this gender bias can be empirically replicated in the 1990s. One hundred and six students responded to 12 scenarios describing a male or female actor's success or failure in either a stereotypically male, stereotypically female, or gender-neutral university course. Subjects were asked to indicate their agreement to ability, effort, luck, and task difficulty attributions for each scenario, and their degree of confidence in their answer. Repeated measures analyses of variance were used to analyse the data. Contrary to predictions, the traditional pattern of female-derogating, male-favouring attributions was not produced. Various explanations were advanced for this absence of gender bias in achievement attributions, including attitudinal, political, and social changes over the last 20 years and the possibility that contemporary sexism is more subtle and expressed in more socially acceptable ways.