You were born creative. As an infant, you had to figure many things out—how to get fed or changed, get help or attention, and make a onesie covered in spit-up still look adorable. As you grew older, your creativity grew, too. You drew pictures, wrote stories, played dress-up, and acted out imaginary stories.
Then you went to school, and it was time to be serious. Suddenly, creativity had a time and place. It became an elective or a hobby. Something you did just enough of to be “well-rounded” but not so much that you would be judged irresponsible or impractical.
When you entered the “real world,” your job determined whether you were creative. Advertising, design, marketing, innovation? Creative. Business, medicine, law, engineering? Not creative.
As if Job-title-a-determinant-of-creativity wasn’t silly enough, in 2022, a paper was published in the Journal of Applied Psychology that declared that, based on a meta-analysis of 259 studies (n=79,915), there is a “male advantage in creative performance.”
Somewhere, Don Draper, Pablo Picasso, and Norman Mailer high-fived.
But, as every good researcher (and innovator) knows, the headline is rarely the truth. The truth is that it’s contextual and complicated, and everything from how the original studies collected data to how “creativity” was defined matters.
But that’s not what got reported. It’s also not what people remember when they reference this study (and I have heard more than a few people invoke these findings in the three years since publication).
That is why I was happy to see Fortune report on a new study just published in the Journal of Applied Psychology. The study cites findings from a meta-analysis of 753 studies (n=265,762 individuals) that show men and women are equally creative. When “usefulness (of an idea) is explicitly incorporated in creativity assessment,” women’s creativity is “stronger.”
Somewhere, Mary Wells Lawrence, Frida Kahlo, and Virginia Woolf high-fived.
Of course, this finding is also contextual.
What makes someone “creative?”
Both studies defined creativity as “the generation of novel and useful ideas.”
However, while the first study focused on how context drives creativity, the second study looked deeper, focusing on two essential elements of creativity: risk-taking and empathy. The authors argued that risk-taking is critical to generating novel ideas, while empathy is essential to developing useful ideas.
Does gender influence creativity?
It can. But even when it does, it doesn’t make one gender more or less creative than the other.
Given “contextual moderators” like country-level culture, industry gender composition, and role status, men tend to follow an “agentic pathway” (creativity via risk-taking), so they are more likely to generate novel ideas.
However, given the same contextual moderators, women follow a “communal pathway” (creativity via empathy), so they are more likely to generate useful ideas.
How you can use this to maximize creativity
Innovation and creativity go hand in hand. Both focus on creating something new (novel) and valuable (useful). So, to maximize innovation within your team or organization, maximize creativity by:
- Explicitly incorporate novelty and usefulness in assessment criteria. If you focus only on usefulness, you’ll end up with extremely safe and incremental improvements. If you focus only on novelty, you’ll end up with impractical and useless ideas.
- Recruit for risk-taking and empathy. While the manifestation of these two skills tends to fall along gender lines, don’t be sexist and assume that’s always the case. When seeking people to join your team or your brainstorming session, find people who have demonstrated strong risk-taking or empathy-focused behaviors and invite them in.
- Always consider the context. Just as “contextual moderators” impact people’s creative pathways, so too does the environment you create. If you want people to take risks, be vulnerable, and exhibit empathy, you must establish a psychologically safe environment first. And that starts with making sure there aren’t any “tokens” (one of a “type”) in the group.
Which brings us back to the beginning.
You ARE creative.
How will you be creative today?
Finding a way to get something done without following all the rules :-)!
That is a level of creativity that knows now gender! It’s also one of my favorite manifestations of creativity. Thanks for bringing it into the conversation, Andrew!
Creativity is intelligent problem solving. Women having children – the survival of the species – requires immense creativity. Pregnant women all over the world are trying to solve the problem of how to get a baby out of their body. Single mothers all over the world are trying to solve the problem of surviving while enabling their kids to survive. Mothers of all forms are just trying to hold a job and raise their kids.
We live it a time when we have told women that they should enter the workforce and become heroes. I have lived in that world – the barbie bubble. Let other people raise your child. You have bigger problem to solve. However, the rise of the suicide rate in children might be a wake up call. There is a direction correlation between the distribution of the mobile phone/social media and teen suicide. In 2017 I quit my job when I saw that statistic to spend more time with my son.. How do you solve this problem without parents being lauded and compensated for their efforts? This is a thing that the government or a technology company can solve alone.
The role of motherhood isn’t lauded the way the role of business people are lauded. Mothers are sometimes told that they are saints. But no one really wants to hear about child rearing – just figure it out. “it’s what women are made for — being a mother. It’s not a wicked problem. It’s hard. It’s nature. It should come to you naturally… and it doesn’t your are stupid.”
However the constant adaptation to your children changing, the world changing, gender roles changing and how to raise good kids is a wicked problem. Being mother is as ambiguous and complex a problem as being an Advertising Executive, a Painter. Or a Writer.
More women are the primary breadwinners. More men are caring for their children. Women are not expected to have children. Gay marriages are challenging our perception of gender roles. Women are given more capabilities – time and energy and access to capital to do work outside the family. But we haven’t fully emerged into a new definition of parenthood that liberates us from gender roles. But I am confident that in the next 50 years we will see marked changes womens’ role in society world-wide.
I wonder how our perception creativity and gender might change in the next 50 years? I wonder how we will address of teen suicide? I wonder if raising the next three generations on planet earth might become the most wicked, most joyful, most heroic thing a person might do.
This is so beautiful and so true. Thank you for sharing this, Suzi! Another friend once commented that if the cost of traditional “woman’s work” – raising children, managing a household, etc – was factored into GPD, we’d look at it differently and value it more.