Creatividad:

1. Creatividad y diferencias de gnero:

Bart, W. M., Hokanson, B., Sahin, I., & Abdelsamea, M. A. (2015). An investigation of
the gender differences in creative thinking abilities among 8th and 11th grade
students. Thinking Skills and Creativity, 17, 17-24.
- 8th grade females scored significantly higher than the 8th grade males on all
of the creativity subtests except for the subtest of fluency.
- Females scored significantly higher than the males among the 11th grade
students on three subtests of creativity (elaboration, abstractness of titles,
and resistance to premature closure); whereas, males and females scored
equally well on the subtests of fluency and originality.
- The resent study indicated that females in the 8th grades had higher
creativity scores on the subtests of originality, elaboration, abstractness of
titles, and resistance to premature closure compared to the males, although
they performed equivalently on the subtest of fluency with the males. The
results also indicated that females in the 11th grades had significantly higher
creativity scores on the subtests of elaboration, abstractness of titles, and
resistance to premature closure, and that they performed equivalently on the
subtests of fluency and originality with the males.
- Females elaborate more with their ideas, present more detail in their
responses, manifest significantly higher synthesizing and organization skills,
and display more intellectual curiosity and open-mindedness compared to the
males. These differences indicate early maturation of the females compared
to the males and suggest that, as males mature, the gap between males and
females could close.
- La importancia de la creatividad reside en la necesidad de la sociedad actual
de contar con personas que sean capaces de encontrar soluciones novedosas
a los problemas, considerando la sociedad moderna y el explosivo desarrollo
tecnolgico. Por esta razn, se considera importante, desde el punto de vista
educacional, formar a personas creativas.
- Existe evidencia contradictoria en relacin a las diferencias de gnero en la
creatividad. As, muchos estudios postulan que no existen diferencias
significativas entre hombres y mujeres, mientras que otros dan cuenta de
ellas, tanto a favor de las mujeres como a favor de los hombres.
Cheung, P. & Lau, S. (2010). Gender Differences in the Creativity of Hong Kong
School Children: Comparison by Using the New Electronic WallachKogan Creativity
Tests. Creativity Research Journal, 22(2), 194-199. DOI:
10.1080/10400419.2010.481522
- Girls were found to excel boys in verbal flexibility, figural fluency, figural
flexibility, figural uniqueness, and figural unusualness.
- It is assumed that, in environments that are designed to provide equal
opportunity for the sexes, girls can out- score boys in creative performance.
- Las diferencias de gnero en creatividad se han estudiado bastante, sin llegar
a una respuesta inequvoca respecto a los resultados. Evidencia da cuenta de
resultados no concluyentes. As, es posible encontrar evidencia en favor de
las nias y otra en favor de los nios. Tambin es posible encontrar resultados

que muestran que no existen diferencias de gnero en la creatividad, como

otros que dan cuenta de resultados mixtos.
According to Russ (2002), the involvement of emotion affects the association
with networks in the search process of creativity tasks. Compared with girls,
boys are freer to express primary process thinking in play or creative activity
(p. 195).

He, W. J., & Wong, W. C. (2011). Gender differences in creative thinking revisited:
Findings from analysis of variability. Personality and individual differences, 51(7),
807-811.
-

Whereas the results of analyses of means generally supported the Gender

Similarities Hypothesis, the variability analyses tended to support the Greater
Male Variability Hypothesis and the Gender Difference Hypothesis. Analyses of
the TCT-DP subscales revealed that both genders have their relative strengths
and weaknesses in creative thinking.

Girls out-performed boys in thoroughness of thinking.

Boys outperformed girls in boundary-breaking thinking.

Variability analyses further showed that more boys clustered in the two
extremes of the composite score. Significantly greater variability was found
for males on five criteria of the TCT-DP.

Importancia de no medir solamente los promedios para ver si existen

diferencias significativas entre gneros, sino tambin la variabilidad entre
gneros (VR) Aspecto novedoso de la evaluacin de creatividad entre
gneros.

Baer, J., & Kaufman, J. C. (2008). Gender differences in creativity. Journal of Creative
Behavior, 42(2), 75-105.
-

Falta de evidencia sobre diferencias de gnero en creatividad, tanto a nivel de

tests como a nivel de logros creativos.
Falta de ambientes que entreguen apoyo a mujeres para el desarrollo de
creatividad.
Si bien la evidencia no apoya la tesis de diferencias de gnero en creatividad,
s se puede establecer que la evidencia disponible sugiere que las nias y las
mujeres tienden a obtener resultados ms altos en los tests de creatividad.
Tests de personalidad relacionados con la creatividad dan cuenta de mayor
apertura a la experiencia en mujeres.
Costa, Terracciano, and McCrae (2001) analyzed gender differences in Openness to Experience based on a secondary analysis of 23,031 people from 26
cultures. They analyzed different components of Openness to Experience, and
found that women scored higher than men on Openness to Aesthetics,
Feelings, and Actions. Men scored higher than women on Openness to Ideas.

There were no differences on Openness to Fantasy or Values. As with Kaufman

and Baers (in press) findings, these differences may be related to gender
stereotypes as much as individual beliefs.
Mcvey (2004) found that adolescent girls in single-sex high schools had
significantly higher creativity scores (originality test scores and experts
ratings on a creative writing task) than matched female subjects in a co-ed
high school, suggesting environmental effects on the girls creative
performance.
Hombres y mujeres no viven en entornos o ambientes que conduzcan
equitativamente a logros creativos.
Assuming any gender differences in creativity are most likely the product of
differing environments would represent the best overall synthesis of what we
currently know about gender differences in creativity.

Ardila, A., Rosselli, M., Matute, E., & Inozemtseva, O. (2011). Gender differences in
cognitive development. Developmental psychology, 47(4), 984.
-

Hombres y mujeres no presentan diferencias significativas en desarrollo

cognitivo, o son mnimas.

Halpern, D. F. (2013). Sex differences in cognitive abilities. Psychology press.

-

The female advantage in verbal abilities can be seen in creative writing.

Kaufman, Niu, Sexton, and Cole (2010) found that womens poems were
judged as more creative than mens poems, even when the sex of the writer
is unknown. These creativity researchers reviewed several other studies with
similar conclusions: women write more creative poems than men do, but
scores on general creativity tests show few differences (most of which favor
females), suggesting that the advantage that females have in creativity is
most probably limited to verbal tasks (Bauer & Kaufman, 2008).
Female superiority on verbal tasks including reading and speaking and is
largest in the high and low ends of the distribution.
Hombres superan a las mujeres en tests de habilidad viso-espacial. Sin
embargo, las explicaciones para estos resultados pueden tener que ven con
variables culturales, socializacin, etc., lo cual no permite tener una idea clara
de por qu se obtienen esos resultados (p. 154).

Runco, M. A. (2014). Creativity: Theories and themes: Research, development, and

practice. Elsevier.
-

Cheung and Lau (2010) concluded that females in junior high grades
excelled boys in verbal flexibility, fig- ural flexibility, figural uniqueness, and
fig- ural unusualness using the electronic Wallach-Kogan creativity tests in a
sample of 2476 4th- to 9th- graders and Misra (2003) found female superiority
using Openness to experience task with 156 Indian students (p. 175).

Halpern, D. F. (2004). A cognitive-process taxonomy for sex differences in cognitive

abilities. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 13(4), 135-139.
-

Females and males show different average patterns of academic achievement

and scores on cognitive ability tests. Females obtain higher grades in school,
score much higher on tests of writing and content-area tests on which the
questions are similar to material that was learned in school, attain a majority
of college degrees, and are closing the gap in many careers that were
traditionally male.

Women have more rapid access to phonolog- ical, semantic, and episodic
information in long-term memory, and obtain higher scores on tests of verbal
learning and the production and comprehension of complex prose.
Males have the advantage on tests of verbal analogies, which may seem to be
verbal but at a cognitive-process level involve mapping relationships in
working memory.

Diversos autores han destacado la importancia de la creatividad como un recurso no solo

deseable, sino necesario en la sociedad actual (Ritter & Dijksterhuis, 2014; Runco, 2004), y que
ha sido esencial para el desarrollo de la civilizacin (Takeuchi et al., 2011). La creciente
complejidad del mundo moderno, asociada a un ritmo de cambio acelerado y la aparicin de
nuevos problemas, hacen necesaria la bsqueda de soluciones rpidas y eficientes. Por esta razn,
la creatividad sobresale como una temtica prioritaria, pues permite una respuesta efectiva y til
ante los cambios, a la vez que facilita la flexibilidad y el proceso de resolucin de problemas
(Runco, 2004).
Dada la relevancia de la creatividad como un factor que facilitara la adaptacin y la solucin de
problemas en una sociedad crecientemente compleja, se considera importante, desde el punto de
vista educacional, formar a personas creativas (Bart, Hokanson, Sahin & Abdelsamea, 2015). En
Chile, un primer paso en esta lnea ha sido la evaluacin de estas dimensiones a travs de pruebas
internacionales como PISA (OECD, 2014), donde los resultados de estudiantes chilenos se han
situado bajo el promedio de los pases evaluados. As, es posible establecer que los alumnos
chilenos exhiben competencias bsicas para la resolucin de problemas, que no les permiten
comprender todas las aristas de un escenario problemtico desconocido, lo cual interfiere en el
proceso de encontrar una solucin adecuada y novedosa al problema planteado (Mineduc, 2014).
La investigacin en torno a la creatividad ha aumentado fuertemente en las ltimas dcadas.
Entre las dimensiones de la creatividad que se han estudiado, es posible sealar las diferencias de
gnero en creatividad. Sin embargo, los resultados distan de ser concluyentes. De acuerdo a Bart
et al. (2015), existe evidencia contradictoria en relacin a las diferencias de gnero en la
creatividad. As, muchos estudios postulan que no existen diferencias significativas entre
hombres y mujeres (Baer & Kaufman, 2008) mientras que otros dan cuenta de ellas, tanto a favor
de las mujeres (Cheung & Lau, 2010; Bart, Hokanson, Sahin & Abdelsamea, 2015) como a favor
de los hombres (Stoltzfus, Nibbelink, Vredenburg & Thyrum, 2011; He, Wong, Li & Xu, 2013).
A su vez, es posible encontrar estudios que dan cuenta de resultados mixtos (He & Wong, 2011;
Costa, Terracciano & McCrae, 2001).

Referencias
Baer, J., & Kaufman, J. C. (2008). Gender differences in creativity. Journal of Creative
Behavior, 42(2), 75-105.
Bart, W. M., Hokanson, B., Sahin, I., & Abdelsamea, M. A. (2015). An investigation of the
gender differences in creative thinking abilities among 8th and 11th grade
students. Thinking Skills and Creativity, 17, 17-24.
Cheung, P. & Lau, S. (2010). Gender Differences in the Creativity of Hong Kong School
Children: Comparison by Using the New Electronic WallachKogan Creativity Tests.
Creativity Research Journal, 22(2), 194-199. DOI: 10.1080/10400419.2010.481522
Costa Jr, P., Terracciano, A., & McCrae, R. R. (2001). Gender differences in personality traits
across cultures: robust and surprising findings. Journal of personality and social
psychology, 81(2), 322.
He, W., Wong, W., Li, Y., & Xu, H. (2013). A study of the greater male variability hypothesis in
creative thinking in Mainland China: Male superiority exists. Personality and Individual
Differences, 55, 882886.
Kaufman, J. C., Niu, W., Sexton, J. D., & Cole, J. C. (2010). In the eye of the beholder:
Differences across ethnicity and gender in evaluating creative work. Journal of applied
social psychology, 40(2), 496-511.
Killingsworth, M. A., & Gilbert, D. T. (2010). A wandering mind is an unhappy
mind. Science, 330(6006), 932-932.
(REVISAR) Ministerio de Educacin (Mineduc). (2014). Apuntes sobre la Calidad de la
Educacin.Sobre Resolucin de Problemas. Anlisis de los resultados de la Prueba PISA
2012. Santiago: autor.
OECD (2014). PISA 2012 Results: Creative Problem Solving: Students Skills in Tackling RealLife Problems (Volume V). Extrado del sitio web de la OECD
http://www.oecd.org/pisa/keyfindings/pisa-2012-results-volume-v.htm
Ritter, S. M., & Dijksterhuis, A. (2014). Creativitythe unconscious foundations of the
incubation period. Frontiers in human neuroscience, 8, 1-10.
Runco, M. A. (2004). Creativity. Annual Review of Psychology, 55, 657687. doi:
10.1146/annurev.psych.55.090902.141502

Schooler, J. W., Smallwood, J., Christoff, K., Handy, T. C., Reichle, E. D., & Sayette, M. A.
(2011). Meta-awareness, perceptual decoupling and the wandering mind. Trends in
cognitive sciences, 15(7), 319-326.
Smallwood, J., & Andrews-Hanna, J. (2013). Not all minds that wander are lost: the importance
of a balanced perspective on the mind-wandering state. Frontiers in psychology, 4.
Smallwood, J., Nind, L., & OConnor, R. C. (2009). When is your head at? An exploration of the
factors associated with the temporal focus of the wandering mind. Consciousness and
cognition, 18(1), 118-125.
Stoltzfus, G., Nibbelink, B. L., Vredenburg, D., & Thyrum, E. (2011). Gender, gender role, and
creativity. Social Behavior and Personality, 39(3), 425432. DOI:
http://dx.doi.org/10.2224/sbp.2011.39.3.425
Takeuchi, H., Taki, Y., Hashizume, H., Sassa, Y., Nagase, T., Nouchi, R., & Kawashima, R.
(2011). Failing to deactivate: the association between brain activity during a working
memory task and creativity. Neuroimage, 55(2), 681-687.