Smart Girls in the 21st Century

By Barbara Kerr, Ph.D. and Robyn McKay, Ph.D.

Drs. Barbara Kerr and Robyn McKay tackle what it means to live with, work with, and be a modern smart girl. Through their keen insights and academic research of real girls and women, they offer valuable information and advice on giftedness, achievement, self-actualization, and more. They examine bright girls' development, types of intelligence, differences in generations, eminent women, barriers to achievement, education & growing talent, adolescence & college, gifted minority girls & women, twice-exceptionalism, and career guidance.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Gifted Unlimited
• Release date: Nov 1, 2020
• ISBN: 9781935067382

Book preview

CHAPTER 1

Smart + Girl: A Beehive of Definitions of Intelligence

What does it mean to be smart? When you think of a smart person, what associations and images come to mind? For most of us, smartness is associated with words like giftedness, talent, genius, brilliance, high ability, and intelligence. Across most cultures today, when people are asked to imagine a smart person, a genius, or a brilliant individual, the image that comes to mind is most often an adult male—a scientist in a lab coat, a nerdy tech entrepreneur, a musician with frowzy hair, or a paint smattered artist throwing color upon a canvas. For most of the history of psychology, genius has meant men achieving the highest honors in activities that are highly valued by other men.

Clearly, the definition of high ability—giftedness—has been colored by ideas of gender, race, and culture. Early studies of genius were studies of eminent men, usually European or American white men, paralleling the appearance in literature of the stereotypes so well known to all of us.

From the beginning of the 20th century until the 1960s, there was one dominant paradigm of giftedness: giftedness equals high IQ. With the proper education, it was thought, all gifted men would have potential for eminence. But by the 1960s, it was clear that high intelligence alone was no guarantee of eminence, even for the most brilliant men. In addition, in the era of struggle for civil rights, the narrow definition of giftedness that seemed to favor white, wealthy, well-educated students was called into question. The need for a broader, defensible definition of giftedness led to the plethora of methods of identification in schools and eventually to the current situation, where the definition of gifted is so conflicted as to be almost meaningless. In his powerful book, Ungifted, Intelligence Redefined, Scott Barry Kaufman describes how the rigid definitions, labels, and conflicted meanings of giftedness have real consequences in children’s lives.¹ A reading disorder and auditory problems landed Kaufman himself in special education as a child, where his rapid learning ability and profound curiosity about the world went unnoticed. Only later, with good fortune, did he discover his own very substantial abilities.

We believe that, similarly, there are smart girls in every classroom whose capacity and desire to learn are overlooked and go unnoticed, simply because they don’t fit their society’s image—and their particular school’s definition—of giftedness. This book will show how too many girls’ abilities and passion for learning are ignored.

It will also show how even those privileged, smart girls who are lucky enough to be labeled gifted and given the challenges they need can be derailed from their dreams by their society’s image of femininity and what a girl should be.

Let’s review some of those conflicting ideas about what it means to be smart.

Smart is…

High Intelligence

Educators in the early 20th century wanted to know if there was a way of predicting which children might become the geniuses that move society forward. Scholars honed in on the idea of intelligence, defined as the ability to learn rapidly and to reason well, as the precursor to outstanding performance. In 1905 in Europe, Alfred Binet and Theodore Simon developed an intelligence test for identifying mental defectives. In 1921, a professor at Stanford University named Lewis Terman decided to use the Stanford Revision of the Binet-Simon Scale as an intelligence test for identifying genius, which he also called giftedness.² Terman made the decision, remarkable for its time, to study both boys and girls, and he even deliberately attempted to create a test that was not sex-biased by excluding items that differentiated between boys and girls. Not only did he develop an intelligence test on the assumption that both boys and girls could be intelligent, but he also asked mostly female teachers to nominate potential students to take the test and he hired female graduate students—like Florence Goodenough and Catharine Cox who later became psychologists—to administer those tests.³

Many social scientists have taken Terman to task for the fact that the original normative group for that test—and many other intelligence tests that followed—were primarily white, middle class, California children. Like most of the scholars of his day, Terman was influenced by eugenics, which held that white people were superior to all other races. Why is it that Terman decided to give the females in his sample a relatively fair opportunity to demonstrate their intellectual abilities in a time when females, like non-white people, were generally considered to have inferior mental ability? Was it the fact that he was surrounded by brilliant women colleagues in one of the first states to allow women to enroll in graduate education? Was it the increasing visibility of strong, achieving women in the American West? The answer will probably never be known. The result, however, was that from the beginning of the study of giftedness, with his sample of 1,528 California children, girls were included.

Without Terman’s study that has followed these gifted children throughout their lives in the 20th century, we would know much less about the development of intelligence in girls. If his original study had been as fair to people of cultures that differed from his own—e.g. Hispanic, Native American, African American, Asian—we would have a more complete picture of the lives of girls who are smart but also distant from privilege and power. For that information, we have had to wait most of the rest of the 20th century.

Following Terman’s study, however, intelligence became one of the most important ideas of the field of psychology, with thousands of scholars studying the concept, devising measures, and applying their findings to education, work, life satisfaction, and health.⁴ Intelligence turned out to be a powerful notion, indeed, because it was able to predict school achievement, success at work, and even health outcomes for most people. Intelligence tests began to be used to select men and women for various military positions, for special educational opportunities, and for high-level positions in business and industry. Intelligence was powerful as a concept because it could be shown to be a single, general trait that affected all human achievement.

No matter how many tests and subtests were developed in different ability domains, such as verbal, mathematical, spatial-visual, the scores tended to correlate with one another; that is, people who are very quick to learn and able to reason well tend to achieve high scores across tests in different intellectual ability areas. In addition, it was shown that students selected by strong intelligence test scores benefited from academic acceleration and that gifted students were often capable of learning much higher level material than was previously thought, if they were allowed to proceed at a rapid pace.⁵ Accelerated programs for gifted students proliferated throughout the U.S. during the Sputnik-era of the late 50s and early 60s, as society raced to catch up in math and science with its Cold War rivals.

Throughout the 20th century, intelligence tests held the supreme position as the major identifier of giftedness, and few challenges were made to their effectiveness or generality. The earliest concerns were voiced by scholars who contended that intelligence could be considered as many different abilities rather than one. In the 1930s, the early psychologist Raymond Cattell made a case for both fluid intelligence—an ability to solve novel, open-ended problems—and crystallized intelligence—an ability to use knowledge and skills that one has already acquired; other psychologists subsequently used the statistical technique of factor analysis to demonstrate that there were specialized areas of intelligence, rather than simply a general one.

Creativity

The concept of creativity, promoted by E. Paul Torrance opened up the possibility that something else contributed to extraordinary achievement besides rapid learning and efficient problem-solving.⁶ That something else was creativity—the ability to produce novel, original, and appropriate solutions to problems. Most people who achieve eminence in their field are both intelligent and creative, because they come up with new and very useful ideas. In society as well as in psychology, creativity has been the poor step-sister of intelligence. Although fascinating in its many faces from art to invention, creativity was considered to be too complex and unpredictable to be measured, and creative people have often been looked upon as too nonconforming and unusual to be productive members of society—that is, until they produce something of value.

Educator E. Paul Torrance changed this by not only championing creativity, but also by developing the first measure of what he termed divergent thinking, the intellectual cornerstone of creative ability.⁷ Torrance claimed that creativity was a better predictor of eminence than intelligence, and he began a long term program similar to Terman’s to track the lives of divergent thinkers. Eventually, it became clear that, although intelligence and creativity were not the same, they were overlapping abilities; some people were very intelligent but not particularly creative, and other people were both intelligent and creative. Like Terman, Torrance believed that both boys and girls had the potential for creative productivity, but he was also interested in creativity as it emerged in cultures other than the dominant, white culture. Torrance’s work broadened the idea of giftedness to include those girls who were not necessarily high achievers in all academic areas, but whose achievement was in creative areas such as arts, design, writing, and music. He also opened the door to idea that giftedness could be found in all cultures.

Intelligence, Creativity, Task Commitment, and More

Torrance’s work had a strong impact on gifted education because it was clear by the 1970s that gifted education programs based on intelligence testing alone were primarily serving white, privileged children. The criticism of intelligence testing and academic tracking reached a crescendo, and at the federal level the quest for equal opportunity led to a search for broader definitions of giftedness. The U.S. Office of Gifted Education, following the Marland Report of 1972, added creativity, leadership, and artistic ability to academic ability as important signs of giftedness.⁸ The Marland Report definition of gifted was adopted by many states, and programs for gifted students sprung up across the country as schools tried to provide services for this group of students. What this meant for girls was that giftedness now included many abilities that girls receive encouragement in developing, such as aesthetic abilities and interpersonal skills.

The new emphasis on equity also encouraged research on culture-fair intelligence testing. And although the goal proved elusive, many new tests and adaptations of old tests appeared in the 1980s, such as the Raven Progressive Matrices, which claimed to measure fluid intelligence, or abstract reasoning, rather than crystallized intelligence, which was assumed to be based more on experience within one’s culture.⁹ The development of these new tests signaled a change in attitudes toward children of nonwhite, lower socioeconomic (SES) backgrounds so that educators were more aware and more motivated to search for talent among these populations. This, too, was a step forward for bright girls.

A new development in the 1980s and 1990s, however, had a negative impact on both smart boys and smart girls. Throughout the U.S., gifted education programs were de-funded and dismantled because of their association with tracking poor, nonwhite students into less challenging education programs. Educators and the general public were led to believe that gifted was a dirty word, with links to racism and the perpetuation of an underclass. Acceleration, the main educational intervention for gifted students, was also decried, even though critics were never able to show any negative results.¹⁰

It is extraordinary how pervasive the negative attitudes toward giftedness became, and along with the negativity came conflicts in every school district about what was to be done with children who demonstrated high intellectual ability. Often the response was to simply ignore smart children, to place them in the regular classroom, and to resist any calls for extra challenge or support by parents of bright children. Many educators tried to make the idea of giftedness more palatable to the public and defensible to policy-makers by broadening the definition and creating more flexible programs that involved enrichment—extending and expanding what was going on in the regular classroom—rather than acceleration. The range of students who could benefit from enrichment was much wider— nearly all of those students of above average intelligence who also showed creativity and task commitment.

Joseph Renzulli and Sally Reis, the leading proponents of this model, created a school-wide enrichment model that soon spread throughout the U.S. and to many parts of the world.¹¹ (It should be noted that many countries, including England and Germany, however, retained some form of tracking.) Because these enrichment programs seldom involved acceleration of very rapid learners and often amounted to only a few hours a week with intellectual peers, both boys and girls with extremely high intelligence and academic abilities were left with little talent development.

By the mid-1980s, the only U.S. funding for gifted education, federal grants through the Jacob Javits Gifted and Talented Students Education Program, would provide support only for gifted education research and interventions that focused on underserved populations, and many other Western countries had similar restrictions on their funding. It is curious that despite three decades of focusing public funding on underserved populations, the image of giftedness and gifted education continued to be linked to privilege in the minds of most policy-makers, educators, and the general public. Nevertheless, these efforts to change the face of giftedness by showing that intelligence, creativity, and leadership emerge in all cultures and all strata of society may have improved the lives of many bright, less privileged children who might have been otherwise overlooked. Sadly, however, these were small waves in an ocean of resentment toward gifted children and gifted education, and even today gifted education programs that happen to enroll mostly white students receive scathing comments in the press.

What about the other stuff? Nobody really knew how to measure some of the other characteristics in the broader definition, like leadership and artistic ability; so checklists, portfolios, and a wide variety of procedures were used by schools attempting to identify smart kids according to the U.S. Department of Education definition. This resulted in such an astounding proliferation of methods that it was difficult to say what anybody meant by gifted without checking a particular school’s approach. Many school administrators just threw up their hands and opted for the most minimal arrangements that they could get away with.

Precocious Math or Verbal Abilities

If the schools were ignoring bright children, the solution it seemed, at least to psychologist Julian Stanley at Johns Hopkins University, was to create university-based programs for gifted children. To return to the idea that intelligent children needed to be identified early and accelerated, Stanley and his colleagues developed the idea of out-of-level testing. They used the SAT, normally only given to high school students, to identify gifted students in seventh grade who could benefit from college-level courses. He and Camilla Benbow went on to establish programs for mathematically and verbally precocious youth that soon spread throughout the U.S. and eventually internationally.

The creation of university-based talent search programs, however, was somewhat of a mixed blessing for smart girls. These programs, which began at Johns Hopkins University and spread to seven other talent search regions, promoted the use of the SAT college admissions tests with seventh graders to identify youth who were already performing at the level of high school seniors. Although both the verbal and the mathematics tests were given, most of the emphasis was upon the high-scoring students in math, for whom the creation of linear, highly accelerated math curricula was simpler than the creation of accelerated verbal programs.

Sadly, for smart girls, the majority of the research publications, as well as the popular media, noted the predominance of males at the upper end of math scores and took this as evidence of a possible male superiority in mathematics. This is a finding which, to this day, has been misinterpreted and over-generalized to create barriers for females in math achievement. It took two decades of research and meta-analyses of mathematics achievement tests to overturn the belief among scholars of a hereditary superiority of males in mathematics, yet the notion of male superiority in math remains quite strong for the general public. As a result, the image of the gifted student, in the public’s eye, still seems to be the mathematically talented boy.

Standardized achievement tests like the SAT claim to be tests of natural reasoning ability; however, the results have been clearly linked to the quality of schooling and home instruction, including opportunities for advanced courses. As a result, achievement test scores are strongly influenced by socioeconomic circumstances, so it is no mystery that most of the students served by these programs were white and Asian-American middle class students. Major efforts were made by all of the talent search sites to be more inclusive of poor and non-white students, with some success, particularly by programs at Northwestern in the Chicago area under the guidance of Paula Olszewski-Kubilius.¹² Even with additional funding to support scholarships and special programs, talent search programs have found it challenging to overcome the difficulties of students from poor and disadvantaged schools in demonstrating their potential.

Talent search programs, nevertheless, did open up a new method of identification of specific talents rather than the expensive and often-derided intelligence tests, and created matching programs during summers and after-school periods that helped thousands of students of very high ability. Many girls who otherwise might never have come to the attention of educators were provided with summer programs, camps, and out of school opportunities to enhance their academic abilities and to learn with intellectual peers.

The emphasis on specific abilities also linked giftedness with actual adult accomplishment because, although eminent people across professions indeed have high general intelligence, they also tend to have particular interests, passion, and motivation to develop their talents in just one, focused area of strength.

Multiple Intelligences

Howard Gardner’s publication of Frames of Mind: The Theory of Multiple Intelligences in 1983 further expanded the possibilities of identification of talent, because, based on his studies of both people with brain impairments and of prodigies, he came to believe that human beings had many different intelligences.¹³ He claimed intelligences were linked with specific areas of the brain, each with its own development, symbol system, and path toward expertise. He suggested seven intelligences (and later expanded further to eight and nine). The seven intelligences—linguistic, mathematical-logical, spatial-visual, interpersonal, intrapersonal, kinesthetic, and musical—were, he said, a better explanation of how talent actually emerges in societies than general intelligence. Gardner’s ideas took the U.S. and the world by storm. In an era of democracy and egalitarianism, it seemed possible now to the public and educators that everybody could be gifted in some way—despite the fact that if all abilities are distributed according to the normal curve, a large group of people would still be average at everything. The multiple intelligences theory was immediately controversial in psychology because of its adamant opposition to the concept of general intelligence.

General and Specific Abilities

Intelligence researchers, turning to study specific abilities, still found over and over that most abilities were highly correlated and that most people of high ability were multipotential—that is, their intelligence could develop in many directions, across domains. Only when more sophisticated statistical techniques and access to large, diverse populations became possible did a new model emerge that encompassed both G, or general ability, and many specific abilities. The Cattell-Horn-Carroll theory, now the most accepted theory by intelligence researchers, holds that there is a hierarchy of abilities with three levels, from very specific to broad that all partake in G, general ability.¹⁴ In addition to this well-researched theory of intelligence, other psychologists have shown the complexities of intelligence by demonstrating, for instance, that at the highest levels of ability—such as mathematical and musical genius—G breaks down. That explains why so many prodigies and extraordinarily eminent individuals have specific extraordinary talents, but may be only above average in other abilities.

Emotional Intelligence

Curiously, although feminist psychologists had long lamented the failure of psychology to recognize interpersonal skills as valuable enough to be considered an aspect of intelligence, it took male authors to provide the convincing argument. The advent of research on emotional intelligence by Reuven Bar-On and others, as well as its popularization by Daniel Goleman, opened the way for a discussion of those strengths that have long been considered the domains in which smart women express their giftedness.¹⁵

Most scholars now agree that although emotional intelligence overlaps intelligence, it adds to the explanation of why some people perform well in interpersonal careers. Although no differences have been found in men and women on tests of emotional intelligence, it is clear that females are more comfortable in school, home, and work using their emotional intelligence to solve problems. It does not matter whether this is because women truly think, reason, and express themselves with a different voice, as cultural feminists such as Carol Gilligan claim, or because women, as lower status people in most societies, have had to cultivate emotional and social abilities in order to gain and preserve power.¹⁶ What matters is that such capacities as understanding and managing the emotions of oneself and others (emotional intelligence) and understanding and using intuition to make decisions (social intelligence) are now part of the discussion about what makes it possible for smart girls to become accomplished women.

Specific Personality Characteristics

Next to intelligence, personality is the most important concept in psychology. Personality has taken its place beside intelligence because, like intelligence, personality is a very powerful predictor of behavior. That is, personality can help predict achievement, creativity, job performance, life satisfaction, and well-being. Also, like intelligence, personality has now been thoroughly researched across cultures, with thousands of personality scales. Throughout the 20th century, personality tests proliferated until the researchers Robert McCrae and Paul Costa gathered all major personality studies together and through factor analysis discovered what is now called the Big Five Personality Theory.¹⁷

From their research, five personality factors emerged that could be found universally among humans, had both genetic and environmental origins, and reflected brain structures found across humanity. According to the research, each of the five personality factors exists on a normal distribution curve with the majority of people falling within one standard deviation (SD) of the average score. As we discuss later, when we teach creative and talented girls about their personalities, we pay specific attention to the scores at either tail of the normal curve (that is, scores that are plus or minus one standard deviation from average) because these are the traits that help us understand what makes a smart girl unique.

The best-known personality trait, and one of the most powerful in determining behavior across different contexts, is Extraversion/Introversion. Extraverts tend to be positive, outgoing, social, assertive, and enthusiastic. They prefer being with people rather than being alone, and they feel energized by the company of others. In contrast, introverts tend to be more reserved and independent. They prefer to be alone, are less interested in people, tend to be quiet, and are less likely to lead.

Many descriptions and checklists of characteristics of gifted students include some reference to extraversion, because research is clear that teachers prefer students who are outgoing, enthusiastic leaders. Most scientists, however, tend to be more introverted than extraverted.¹⁸ In school years, however, introverts might be overlooked and not considered gifted because of their unwillingness to speak up and be noticed. In extreme cases, introverted gifted girls hide away under tables and in other small spaces where they can spend hours reading fan fiction or writing story after story. The extraversion/introversion personality trait is only moderately correlated with intelligence, meaning that highly intelligent people can be either extraverted or introverted.¹⁹

Many people also have heard of the second personality trait, Neuroticism/Emotional Stability. People who are neurotic tend to be overly sensitive and to have difficulty regulating their emotions (especially anxiety). They tend to be self-conscious, sensitive to stress, and may experience frequent negative emotions such as depression, fear, embarrassment, sadness, and guilt. One of the strongest correlations between personality and intelligence is the inverse correlation of neuroticism with intelligence. That is, the majority of intelligent people are emotionally stable, well-adjusted, and non-defensive. Most people, including teachers, don’t like to be around neurotic people, so it is no accident that most gifted checklists include good adjustment and stability. That said, we have encountered many smart girls—especially smart adolescents—who struggle with at least some features of neuroticism. The bad news? Maximizing one’s potential is profoundly more difficult if one must also focus on regulating one’s emotions. The good news is that with emotional self-regulation skills training, smart girls can learn how to manage their emotions so that they can better cope with the emotional ups-and-downs that accompany neuroticism.

The third characteristic is Agreeableness/Disagreeableness. Agreeableness is just what it sounds like—the tendency to be friendly, likeable, and willing to go along with others’ ideas and directions. Disagreeableness is being prickly, unfriendly, competitive, and nonconforming. This personality characteristic is only moderately heritable and moderately related to intelligence. Teachers love agreeable students.²⁰ In fact, highly agreeable students are probably overrepresented in gifted programs because of the halo effect—nice kids just seem smarter.

However, we want to note that creative and innovative people tend to be fairly disagreeable, which turns out to be an asset when pursuing and implementing ideas that most people don’t understand.²¹ Disagreeable smart girls tend to tell you exactly what they think, and they won’t have to be taught how to say no. Agreeable smart girls seem to have the opposite problem. Though there is nothing more pleasing to some teachers than an agreeable smart girl, as she matures she will have difficulty saying no, even when she’s overwhelmed, because she doesn’t want to disappoint anyone. What’s the problem with the inability to say no sometimes? Her can-do attitude may give way to overcommitting herself and eventually dropping the ball on important tasks. Agreeability may also be related to a tendency to compromise one’s goals and to put others’ goals ahead of one’s own—a tendency that could lead bright women to let go of their dreams.

The fourth aspect of personality is Conscientiousness/Non-conscientiousness, which seems to be mostly learned and only inherited to a small degree. Think about conscientiousness as work ethic. Conscientious people are industrious, orderly, and committed to finishing the tasks they begin; non-conscientious people are careless, impulsive, unreliable, and not interested in working hard—unless it is something that they really love. Teachers and supervisors love conscientious students because they’re great at getting their work done and turned in on time. They’re serious about work and unlikely to slack off when they lose interest.

Conscientiousness also plays a big role in being identified as gifted. In fact, no matter how intelligent a child might be, if she is not task-committed, she is unlikely to be selected for a gifted program. Many children who lack conscientiousness are labeled as having Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD). A great challenge for creative and talented girls who are not conscientious is to generate the self-discipline and internal motivation needed to complete tasks. As is the case with managing neuroticism, conscientiousness is something that girls can develop with the help of skilled counselors, teachers, and parents. For many creative women, the practice of what we call selective consciousness means being highly conscientious in one’s chosen vocation, but less conscientious about things like housework, social events, and fashion.

Finally, Openness to Experience/Closed is the personality characteristic least known to the public, but it is possibly one of the most important to our society. Being open to experience means being curious, intellectual, ready for new experiences, and appreciative of beauty and sensory impressions. People who are open to experiences keenly experience both positive and negative emotions. Being closed to experience means being indifferent to new experiences and uninterested in new sensations. Closed individuals are conventional, conservative, emotionally restrained, and uninterested in intellectual pursuits.

Openness to Experience is moderately to highly heritable and moderately related to intelligence.²² Some smart people are open to experiences, and others are closed. Sometimes we call openness to experience the hallmark of the creative personality because it is the personality variable most strongly associated with creativity. The research on teachers’ reactions to openness to experience is mixed; most teachers do seem to enjoy creative children, but their constant curiosity and readiness to try new activities can make it difficult to keep them engaged in an ordinary classroom. Our society is also mixed in how it views of openness to experience. While we admire and lionize our great inventors, artists, performers, and writers, we often don’t recognize or appreciate the characteristics of creativity during childhood. Creative personality characteristics, however, are an important aspect in checklists of characteristics of gifted children. In our experience, openness to experience is the personality characteristic that enables smart girls and women to say yes to (or take advantage of) opportunities for personal and professional growth and development.

A large number of articles and books about gifted children refer to overexcitabilities, which are considered to be psychobiological tendencies of gifted people to be highly responsive to stimuli in a number of different areas—psychomotor, sensual, emotional, imaginational, and intellectual.²³ Most of these overexcitabilities (OEs) seem to have a high degree of overlap with Big Five personality characteristics; some aspects of imaginational and intellectual OEs overlap with openness to experience, psychomotor OE reflects impulsive aspects of non-conscientiousness, and sensual OE reflects the overly sensitive aspects of neuroticism. What makes the overexcitabilities theory different from other theories of giftedness is the definition of giftedness as neurological characteristics that lead to advanced development (rather than to intelligence). It would be possible, therefore, for a child to be lacking in working memory or advanced problem-solving ability, but still to be considered gifted based on her sensitivity to stimuli, her intense emotional reactions, and her high activity level.

Because only psychologists generally have access to the research and the more sophisticated personality tests based on the Big Five Personality Theory, more teachers of gifted students know much more about overexcitabilities (OEs) than about Big Five Personality Theory. Unlike the Big Five Personality Theory, OE theory is based on small samples and case studies and does not have decades of research with tens of thousands of subjects; nor does it have supporting evidence of cross-cultural, genetic, and neurological validity. Although OE theory is known primarily within the gifted community, it remains a highly attractive metaphor and highly popular way of seeing giftedness as personal qualities, rather than being directly related to learning capacities.

Spiritual Intelligence

Since the great psychoanalyst Carl Jung broke from Sigmund Freud and developed his own theory of the self, thinkers and writers in many fields have noted that there is more to mental health than the absence of misery or pathology. That is, there may be optimal states of psychological development where people transcend the ordinary experiences of life—a state of integration of thought, emotion, and behavior that allows a person to see the big picture of connections between and among ourselves and the universe.

Abraham Maslow studied self-actualized people—those people who not only realized their full intellectual, emotional, and creative potential, but who also seemed to have reached their spiritual potential. He described self-actualized people as people who perceived reality efficiently, but with a spontaneity and freshness of appreciation for new experiences. Self-actualized people were quick-witted and funny, but with humor that was not cruel. They were comfortable with themselves and others, as well as with their place in nature. They had a sense of purpose, a mission, and cared about the fulfillment of an idea beyond themselves. They had little patience for authoritarians and were independent in their attitudes and behaviors. They had a few profound, satisfying friendships while having a sense of fellowship with all humanity, yet they were also perfectly happy savoring solitude. Finally, they had a capacity for a transcendent state that Maslow called the peak experience—a state of consciousness in which they were transfixed with awe, alive with wonder, and a sense of harmony and oneness with all being.²⁴

When you consider all the other kinds of giftedness we have talked about, it seems as if spiritual intelligence encompasses general intelligence (efficient perception, quick humor), creativity (spontaneity, autonomy, freshness of appreciation, solitude), and emotional intelligence (acceptance of self, others, and nature; fellowship with humanity). That leaves peak experiences to be explained as frequent, deliberate entries into altered states of consciousness in order to feel connected, in harmony, and transformed.

Robert Emmons and Kathleen Noble call these abilities to enter transcendent states spiritual intelligence. When Howard Gardner proclaimed that spiritual intelligence was not an intelligence, he ignited a controversy. Robert Emmons retorted that there was good evidence for spirituality as a set of abilities that enable people to solve problems and attain goals.²⁵ He identified the components as:

Capacity for transcendenc

Ability to enter into heightened spiritual states of consciousness

Ability to invest everyday activities, events, and relationships with a sense of the sacred

Ability to utilize spiritual resources to solve problems in living

Capacity to engage in virtuous behavior—to show forgiveness, to express gratitude, to be humble, to display compassion.

Kathleen Noble added the ability to use spirituality in the service of one’s own growth and that of others. ²⁶

People with spiritual intelligence, according to the researchers who have studied them, use spiritual skills such as mindfulness, meditation, prayer, trance, and ecstatic experiences. Howard Gardner claimed that the definitions and descriptions of spiritual intelligence were so broad as to mean everything and nothing. After my immersion experiences in Native American spiritual traditions, as well as my study of healers across cultures, I defined spiritual intelligence as the capacity to alter consciousness in the service of self and others, a definition that closely relates to anthropologists’ definition of the major skill of traditional spiritual leaders.²⁷

The Beehive of Smart Girls

The many conflicting definitions of giftedness made it very difficult to form generalizations about smart girls. We reflected on and discussed for many years all the research we could find on the many perspectives on intelligence, creativity, emotional intelligence, and spiritual intelligence. We developed the model you see here to help clarify what we mean as we talk about smart girls. Perhaps because the farm where we lived when we began this book had a lively beehive, the bee society became a way for us to talk about giftedness in girls.

The beehive is a good metaphor for the diversity of talents of smart girls, because it shows how particular abilities, when fully developed, lead to specific roles in society. In addition, a beehive has a broad foundation, as does this model of female giftedness. The model is based on the research that shows that high intelligence—the ability to catch on, make sense of things, and know what to do about it—is the foundation of giftedness. We built our Beehive model from the assessments and interviews of 500 gifted students, all nominated for their creativity in five domains.²⁸ Using statistical methods of factor analysis and cluster analysis, we discovered groups of students who shared common personalities and interests. We found that values—our sense of what is right, true, and important in life—added a little more information that was helpful in figuring out career paths.

Intelligence is measured by a wide variety of tests, most of them now based on the Cattell-Horn-Carroll theory of intelligence, and the range of intelligence test scores associated with giftedness is most commonly 95th percentile to the top of the 99th percentile, although many gifted programs accept bright students of above average ability, which is actually about the 90th percentile.²⁹ The intelligence tests that are used all provide many tasks in hopes of measuring diverse aspects, but most measure some aspect of working memory and speed of information processing.

We have already mentioned the problems with bias in intelligence testing and the fact that it is almost impossible to have a culture fair test when our very notion of intelligence is a modern, Western conception. Despite these problems, we think it is important to continue to recognize that speedy information processing and working memory, no matter how hard they are to measure, are the foundation of intelligence and therefore of giftedness. All of the other forms of giftedness we show here are combinations of intelligence with some other characteristic of that person that adds predictive power for forecasting the potential realization of ability. For example, creativity thinking and personality add to intelligence to predict that a person will thrive in a creative career. Emotional intelligence adds to intelligence to predict that a person will do well in careers requiring interpersonal skills. And spiritual intelligence may add to intelligence to predict that a person will thrive in a religious, spiritual, or philanthropic career. All of this adds to what we know—that intelligence predicts not only academic achievement, but also job performance. It is also one of the best predictors of health, psychological adjustment, and well-being.

So, here is our beehive. Figure 1.1 provides a summary of each of the bee types, along with their characteristics, the role that they play in our society, and their specific, work-related focus.

Figure 1.1. Beehive of Smart Girls

Worker Bees: The Professionals

Children who score above the 95th percentile on these tests are likely to do well in school, to graduate from high school and college, and to go on to become the professionals who maintain our society. As young girls, worker bees have multiple talents and interests; as teens, they may have a hard time choosing among their many options; and by adulthood, they have often gained degrees, honors, and awards in their field. These are the smart people we think of as our experts. These girls tend to combine conscientiousness with high abilities.

In the beehive, the problem-solvers figure out what to do to build the hive, keep it healthy and warm, and defend it. In our society, the expert/professionals (problem-solvers) are the lawyers, physicians, accountants, analysts, and engineers we turn to when we need highly trained individuals to advise us. Because of their capacity to learn quickly and reason well, the majority of gifted students grow up to be society’s problem-solvers. Although professions were once dominated by men, more than 50% of entering classes in law and medicine today are women. Increasingly, smart women will fill these important roles by applying knowledge to the solution of practical, critical problems.

Forager Bees: The Scholars

The other kind of expert is the scholar. At higher levels of intelligence, we often see specialization of abilities. Seventh grade Talent Search students, who score at or above the average for high school seniors in one of the scales of the SAT or ACT, often become specialists in a particular field. These highly intelligent students may also grow up to be problem-solvers, but many will choose to be scholars. These gifted adults are professors and researchers, journalists, and high-level information technologists. Society’s gatherers and sharers of knowledge are the forager bees of the hive. Many smart girls with high intelligence and very high specific abilities will become scholars in fields that match their high level abilities in math, verbal, spatial-visual, and musical areas. As girls, they are already finding one area of their vast general knowledge to be particularly interesting and beginning to hone their skills and learn rapidly in that area. As adolescents, they will excel in achievement tests in their domain and be very attracted to pre-professional programs. Later, as adults at colleges and universities, they will gather knowledge, whether it is in humanities, sciences, or arts, and share it through teaching and writing. As media and tech specialists, they will gather ideas and images to share throughout the world online, building human knowledge as they go