The “Voice Loss” of Gifted Girls

Carol Gilligan famously noticed the lack of females in psychological research and her work exploits this absence. She introduces the concept of voice, which has both literal and metaphoric definitions, and traces its loss and rediscovery among girls and women. In “The Centrality of Relationship in Human Development” (1996), she engages with the phenomenon of a vulnerable critical period, which finds girls vibrant and healthy in early childhood, and then suddenly much more susceptible to psychological pressures (like depression and self-doubt) with the start of adolescence. Boys, meanwhile, become vulnerable at a younger age. Gilligan points out the consequences of a critical period that coincides with the dawn of adolescence: abstract thinking has begun to develop and leaves girls with a resulting double awareness. They sense, first, an inner world of personal thoughts and feelings and, second, an outer world of cultural and social expectations. Balancing these dual realities puts a special cognitive strain on girls and often leads to confusion and disassociation. I would like to expand Gilligan’s notion of the dual-world problem, likening it to a particularly dangerous kind of cognitive dissonance that complicates the larger picture of gender imbalance.

F. Scott Fitzgerald once wrote that “the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.” Girls in American culture encounter this challenge as they try to reconcile their inner and outer selves, but in an alarming number of cases, they cease to function in any healthy way. Unfortunately, they construe this failure as indeed a sign of a second-rate intelligence, calling themselves “stupid” and undercutting their knowledge with phrases like “I don’t know.” But, as Gilligan points out, it is precisely the brightest and most gifted girls who suffer the severest effects of dissonance; and thus it is the smartest girls who are most likely to doubt their smartness. Why are gifted girls particularly vulnerable to adolescent “voice loss”? Gilligan does not explain, so I am left to guess at the reasons. It may be that gifted girls have more refined powers of abstraction and are thus more sensitive to the disparity between their outer and inner worlds. As the disparity increases, so does the cognitive burden, since contradictions become bigger and harder to contain inside a single mental framework. It could also be that gifted populations are more perfectionistic, and pressures to succeed are amplified. Or perhaps the answer is a simple matter of salience. Girls who perform extremely well and then flounder show a more obvious decline in function than girls who initially perform at a mediocre level, since the distance from high to low exceeds the distance from middle to low. Whatever the reason, the silencing of gifted girls constitutes an important loss. Gifted girls, after all, have the potential to think up some of the most creative solutions to the challenge of gender inequality.

But if the repressed voices of gifted girls contribute to harmful gender patterns, so does the very nature of cognitive dissonance. Psychology tells us that people have a motivational drive to reduce dissonance by changing how they feel about the conflicting pressures. So girls who juggle a bright and opinionated mind with a desire to appear sweet and docile may respond by refuting their intelligence. This adjustment may reduce individual dissonance, but it simultaneously reinforces patriarchal axioms that define females as submissive. These axioms, in turn, affect another generation of girls and ignite another round of dissonant pressures. It is a hard-to-break loop, and it is especially problematic when we recall that girls, unlike boys, have already learned to reason abstractly when they reach their vulnerable period. This ability to deal in formal (rather than concrete) operations equips girls with an especially acute awareness of identity struggles. Females, then, have an insight into the gender imbalance that may remain largely unavailable to males. Contributing their voices becomes increasingly important, and failing to communicate becomes increasingly devastating. It would be helpful to look to subcultures that show surprisingly high resilience during the adolescent years to see what, exactly, it is that allows them to keep their voices clear and strong.