Women and girls are less likely to be seen as suited to brainy tasks, researchers have found, in the latest study to shed light on gender biases.

Female students do better at school and are more likely to go to university than their male peers. However, the latest study reveals that females are deemed intellectually inferior, and that such prejudices are present not only in adults of both sexes but in children too.

Dr Andrei Cimpian, a co-author of the research, from New York University, said the study showed that people act upon the stereotypes they hold – helping to explain women’s under-representation in numerous fields seen as needing a high IQ, including science and technology.

It also provides insight into why claims of gender bias when hiring for jobs are so hotly debated. “If [the] referral process is biased then even if the ultimate decision is based on merit, you are still making a decision on the basis of a pool of candidates that doesn’t have as many women as it should have given their competence,” said Cimpian.

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Writing in the journal American Psychologist, Cimpian and colleagues report how they carried out an experiment, first on group of just under 350 participants and then on about 800 people.

Participants were asked to read a job description and then recommend two people they knew for the position. While half of each group, picked at random, were told the job needed skills such as “consistent effort”, the other half were given a job description describing the need for brains.

The team found similar patterns for both the smaller and larger group of participants, with women about as likely as men to be referred for the job requiring traits such as “consistent effort”, but less likely than men to be referred if intelligence was specified.

With the results from the two groups pooled, the team found women received 43.5% of referrals for the “brainy” job – with the odds of them being referred for a position 25.3% worse than when traits such as IQ were not mentioned. “Both men and women were less likely to recommend a woman for the ‘brilliance’ job than the ‘boring’ job,” Cimpian said.

In another experiment, the team asked 192 children aged between five and seven to learn two new games and then to pick three teammates from photos of unknown boys and girls. While half of the children were told to just pick whoever they’d like, the other half were told participants needed to be very clever.

The results show that in both cases girls prefer to pick girls and boys to pick boys – but, for their third choice, the likelihood of picking a female teammate dropped when the game was described as being for “really, really smart” children.

Cimpian said the study backed up previous work showing children believe boys are innately more gifted but girls do better at school because they work hard. “Kids are not born with this idea – we are still in the process of figuring out exactly where it is coming from,” he said, adding that teachers, the media and parents might all be involved.

However, the authors admit there are limitations to the latest study – including that the scenarios are hypothetical.

Angela Saini, the author of Inferior, said gender stereotypes were absorbed from an early age. “It is just so pernicious, it starts from the second you are born,” she said.

Saini said “genius” might partly be seen as male trait because history was taught to have involved male “lone genius” figures – who had more opportunities than women to engage in intellectual work, and who were often supported by uncelebrated women.

Dame Athene Donald, a professor of experimental physics at the University of Cambridge, described the widespread bias against women as dispiriting. “[This study] should be a wake-up call to our society to change our thinking and how we pass on these biases in our daily lives to the next generation,” she said.