Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Age or Ability Specific Forums Highly gifted vs prodigy...how to tell the differe

Here's a thought-- as to why "prodigies" tend to be male... in all but a few areas:

Perhaps this is either a nurtured/innate difference in level of competitive/cooperative tendencies in the individual. Girls are frequently taught by well-meaning parents, extended family, and other caregivers from a rather young age that being "competitive" is not very feminine, at the very least. Those messages are pretty insidious and difficult to avoid. Girls learn quite young that being a cutthroat competitive personality is a route to social misery, at least within one's own gender. Some of that seems to be biologically driven.

There is no way to play chess "collaboratively" so that nobody loses. KWIM?

What I find rather interesting is that so few domains are designated "prodigy" domains to start with. LOL. Most of them happen to be male-dominated pursuits for one reason or another-- if one takes sports, for example, most of those ARE going to be male-dominated by definition, and they certainly are seldom co-ed by virtue of biological differences between genders.

But what about music, where physiology would seem to play no role at all? That one would have to be entire nurture, I'm thinking, since nature probably distributes the ability rather evenly.

I have two musical prodigies in my extended family-- one of each gender. The male one was encouraged to pursue it as a career-- the female one was DISCOURAGED to pursue it as a soloist because it wasn't "feminine" to be beating others in competition, I presume.

Honestly, the female was the more talented of the two, and had a better solo instrument (piano, other keyboard, guitar, etc. etc. etc.) than the male one (clarinet, other woodwinds). Just as an aside, the female one was also probably a potential MATH prodigy, though this too was strongly discouraged in that family. The male prodigy wound up doing the conservatory track and made a living as an symphonic musician and teacher, albeit not at the elite level. Though he did spend time showcased as a military band member during the Vietnam era, so.

If this hypothesis is true, then one would expect the appearance of high level talent to be quite unevenly distributed-- by nationality as well as gender-- on instruments where size is mostly irrelevant, such as the brass/woodwind instruments and the smaller string instruments. (Not everyone has the hand size to play piano or double-bass, and this is uneven by gender).

That does seem to be true. Internationally, male soloists seem to be somewhat more common than female ones, but within individual instruments, there is a CLEAR cultural influence-- consider the flute or trumpet for example. Few female trumpet soloists in the US where brass instruments are a "guy" thing, and most international flautists are male, though almost none of them are American... where nearly all flute soloists are female. Heck, nearly all FLAUTISTS in America are female. Just as many danseurs are European, and yet America seems to have no difficulty producing prima ballerinas.

It's an interesting thing, to look beyond the obvious explanations that break down once one examines the evidence for counterexamples, and questions "why" those counterexamples exist. Are they merely outliers? Perhaps-- but then again, everyone who is a prodigy or PG either one is already an outlier.

I'd be very interested to see if male prodigies have a wider range of IQ than female ones do, at least unless one ventures into female-dominated domains like dance or musical theater. My guess is that they do-- because for a girl, social interaction is biologically a prime directive. That offers a powerful innate motivation to NOT engage in competitive activities that would damage one's social interactions and standing among peers. However, if you're already "weird" and you can't do anything about it, then all bets are off-- you have nothing to lose by being yourself and exploring an area of this level of ability. I'd expect that the same thing should hold true within female-dominated areas in the arts-- the boys that pursue them avidly probably have some other factor that makes them non-normative to begin with, be that gender identity, intelligence, or something else.

Does that make sense?


I certainly experienced this myself. My own LOG tended to be higher than the males in the male-dominated domains, as often as not. And really, those were domains where the price of admission to begin with is usually IQ > 135. It's just very obvious when you can make cognitive leaps that others can't, or just DO things that others have to work through step by painful step. Well, I'm sure that everyone here gets what I mean by that.

Girls by and large-- and women, too-- would often weigh the social cost of being themselves as being "not worth" the possible glory in standing head and shoulders above others. That's still seen as being distinctly UN-feminine.

OP's DS9 has shown to be top 0.1% intellectually, and it looks like this has transferred over to certain aspects of musical ability, that may be similarly rare. But, to answer OP's question, no, I wouldn't use the term "prodigy" for this.

According to

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/09/arts/music/09composers.html
The Greatest
By ANTHONY TOMMASINI
New York Times
January 7, 2011

the great composers have all been male.

Looking at

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/08/25/AR2006082500218.html
Top 25 for the 20th Century
by Tim Page
Washington Post
Sunday, August 27, 2006

the pattern has persisted in modern times.

Hmm - I just realized that people may have widely varying interpretations of what rises to the level of prodigiousness. Perhaps even more widely disparate then the use of the PG label. For example, Davidson appears to apply the PG label even when just one index or GAI on the WISC reaches the 145 (99.9%) level. Other authorities would not consider even a full scale IQ at 160 on a modern/current IQ test as sufficient to merit of the use of the PG label.

Then there is the issue of age in determining prodigiousness. Many people associate the term prodigy with child prodigy. Furthermore, the term "child" in this context often references young children (not usually tweens and rarely teens).

Sports provide interesting examples. Do we often hear of child athletes refer to as prodigies? What about sports associated with early peaks and are dominated by teens like women's figure skating? Certainly not all internationally prominent athletes (actual Olympic medal contenders) would qualify for child prodigy status, but at least some of them must have been at a prodigious level at a young age.

This is an interesting thread -- and apologies to the OP for going off tangent.

yes-- but WHY?

A look into families that produced multiple prodigy talents is HIGHLY instructive there. Take a look at the Mozarts and the Mendelssohn siblings for a glimpse of what I'm getting at there. Fanny was widely considered to be (by contemporaries who knew both children well) far more gifted than Felix. But she was not supported as a composer, and was discouraged from pursuing further training as a composer more seriously. This pattern is not at all unusual in famous composers-- that is, that they may well have had a female sibling who gave every indication of being at least equally talented, but who remain(s/ed) unknown.

When one looks at cloistered populations, the gender difference is considerably less marked in terms of poetry, music, and writing. Environment clearly plays a pretty significant role.

It wasn't until painting became a more "respectable" and "proper" pastime for women (in the late 19th and early 20th century) that female artists began to attain something like parity in elite art circles, either. The art of the Renaissance is almost entirely male, for example-- the few examples which endure of female painters with that kind of prodigious ability were the products of QUITE unusual upbringings-- upbringings that treated them more as boys than as girls.



So no, I'm not at all convinced that the arts historically represent natural occurrence of prodigy talents very well. They represent nurture of such abilities, almost certainly. Contemporarily, they certainly do so more than at times in the past-- and it is probably no coincidence that CURRENTLY, this disparity is shrinking.

The Juilliard School is 54% male, and 46% female; a disparity which has been shrinking annually. It's certainly not because fewer female applicants are in the pool-- if anything it is the other way around. If you are male, the numbers suggest that your odds of admission are TWICE what they are if you're female. The pattern is repeated at other prestigious conservatories, I might add.

Hear, hear, HK. Well said.

Yes - this is us (except for us, replace PG with HG).


This makes sense to me as well. Gifted kids can be prodigies and prodigies can be gifted but they're not the same thing.

I suspect that what we are calling "giftedness" is also about developmental arc over a lifetime, so it's not really about potential in the sense of achievement. You get the developmental arc whether you are at potential or not.

Prodigies would seem to be a combination of specific developmental arcs, whether gifted or not, and a specific sphere of talent/ability.

You can probably forcibly create a prodigy. I would expect that such creation is not pleasant for the prodigy, since you are forcing the prodigy into the absolute top of the possible developmental arc for extended periods of time.

IMHO, prodigies are those children who at a young age can perform at least as well as highly trained adults. So, there has to be talent, drive, family resources, parental attitude, right instructors, etc. Sarah Chang is a prototypical example:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarah_Chang

DD is showing early promises in math and music (learns quickly and naturally and is very driven) but she's certainly not a prodigy.

Mmm hmm. Indeed.

I was blown away, and not in a good way, when a friend laughingly told me how my DD and hers "always just make up rules and play silly chess" during chess instruction in school. Keep in mind that while DS is no doubt more talented than DD (he is, after all, 4 years younger), she certainly does beat him sometimes and he must concentrate for sure when they play. "I guess she's not like [DS], huh?" she said.

The child is my DD's best friend. I asked DD about it. "She's not any good," she told me, "so I don't want to really play her because I would win and she would be embarrassed."