Looking Inside the Black Box of Gender Differences in Creativity: A Dual-Process Model and Meta-Analysis

Although prior work has characterized creativity as a primarily agentic endeavor, we diverge from this perspective and argue for agentic and communal pathways to creativity that offer unique advantages to each gender. We draw from social role theory to predict that risk-taking and empathic tendencies-as agentic and communal mechanisms, respectively-help explain how gender influences creativity. We also identify contextual moderators that can strengthen the communal pathway-predicting a more positive relationship between empathic tendency and creativity as well as a stronger indirect effect via empathic tendency when the tasks demand perspective-taking and when usefulness is explicitly incorporated in creativity assessment. With a meta-analysis of 753 independent samples (265,762 individuals), we find support for a communal pathway (i.e., women are creative via empathic tendency) and for an agentic pathway (i.e., men are creative via risk-taking tendency). We also find that the communal pathway is stronger when usefulness is explicitly incorporated in creativity assessment. Task demands for perspective-taking did not show a moderating effect. Taken together, our findings provide a more balanced account of the gender-creativity relationship, demonstrate why men and women differ in creativity and when women can leverage the communal mechanism to enhance creativity, and inform theory and practice towards a more gender-equitable workplace.