Prior research has shown that men are often seen as more creative than women, a view that may stem from gender stereotypes and may contribute to gender inequity. Challenging this conventional belief that creativity is mainly a male quality, a new study from the College of Business at City University of Hong Kong (CityUHK) offers fresh insights into gender differences in creativity. Although men are often regarded as more creative due to their tendency to take bold steps in uncertain situations, women exhibit creativity in a different way, leveraging an empathic understanding of the needs and desires of others to create novel and useful solutions.
The study, led by Professor Kim Joohyung of the Department of Management at CityUHK, suggests that women can be just as creative as men when their empathic tendencies are recognised and nurtured. The research highlights that creativity requires not only novelty-promoted by risk-taking-but also the usefulness of ideas-fostered by empathy.
The research team conducted a meta-analysis of 753 independent samples (265,762 individuals) to analyse the relationship between gender and creativity. Professor Kim's team proposed a dual-process model of creativity, which includes both agentic and communal pathways. They found that men's greater tendency to take risks (i.e., the agentic path) and women's greater tendency to be empathic (i.e., the communal path) serve as two distinct pathways that explain each gender's creative contributions. Importantly, women's strength in creativity (i.e., their empathic tendency) can be best recognised when the usefulness of ideas is factored into creativity evaluation.
The study findings challenge the prevailing characterisation of creativity as primarily agentic, which likely stemmed from overemphasising the aspect of its novelty. "Previous research has often overlooked the importance of usefulness in creating and assessing creative ideas," said Professor Kim. "Our approach of considering both agentic and communal sources of creativity offers a more comprehensive and balanced theoretical account of creativity."
The study cautions corporations and other organisations against placing excessive emphasis on novelty in creativity evaluations because such a focus on novelty may inadvertently favour men's creative contributions over those of women, who excel at generating useful solutions that address others' problems through their empathic inclination. Further, failure to properly assess the practicality of ideas may lead employees to generate groundbreaking but useless ideas that do not meet the needs of customers, clients or other stakeholders.
"Both women and men have their own strengths in creativity. Men's creativity benefits from their inclination to take risks, while women's creativity is enhanced by their empathic tendency," concluded Professor Kim. "Recognising these differences can help corporations and organisations better appreciate and foster creativity in all employees. We recommend that management teams of corporations and organisations adopt creativity evaluations that explicitly consider usefulness."
This research serves as a stepping stone towards a more equitable work environment, encouraging corporations and other organisations to recognise and value the creative contributions of both men and women.
