Invisible intelligence: Girls with high abilities who don’t fit in

When we think of people with high intellectual abilities, what names come to mind? Einstein, Hawking, Da Vinci, Gates… The list is usually populated almost exclusively by men. However, throughout history, there have been thousands of women with extraordinary intellectual potential. The problem is that, too often, they remained in the shadows or, even having won a Nobel Prize, are unknown to most of us. In the field of science alone, there are 17 women who have received this award, and yet many of us could barely name two or three of them.

Javier Tourón and Steven Pfeiffer define high abilities as “a set of cognitive, motivational, creative, and personal characteristics that, in interaction with the environment, allow for superior performance or exceptional potential.” According to this criteria, between 10% and 15% of the population has high abilities, and approximately 2% belongs to the group of gifted individuals.

The invisibility of high-ability women is no accident. From childhood, many learn to hide their talents in order to fit in, and avoid standing out in the classroom so as not to be labeled a know-it-all. For girls, the desire for acceptance is much stronger, leading them to intentionally lower their own academic performance and even conceal their true interests to pretend these align with the majority. Furthermore, high ability tends to be associated with brilliant performance in male-dominated fields, such as mathematics or science, while girls can excel in creative, social or linguistic areas, which are valued less highly.

While gifted boys are viewed with curiosity, envy, or even admiration, girls have historically been expected to be discreet, agreeable, and compliant. The result: many go unnoticed until adulthood, when they finally discover that what made them feel “odd” was, in reality, extraordinary potential and boundless sensitivity.

In our practice, we see this frequently: most of the women who come for evaluation do so because one of their children has previously been identified as high-ability. Upon observing the parallels between what their child is experiencing and what they themselves have felt throughout their lives, they decide to take the step.

Many women, upon receiving the report, burst into tears, finally finding answers to so many years of questions, loneliness and misunderstanding. As they reach adulthood, they seek to understand their own history, to put a name to their difference, and to find new meaning in it. Furthermore, because they are usually more involved in their children’s education and schooling, they are often the ones who accompany their kids through the early stages of the learning process, which facilitates this personal awakening. Ultimately, in seeking answers to understand their children, they also resurrect that part of themselves they had carried, with more sorrow than joy, throughout their lives.

Today we know that girls face a double challenge: on the one hand, the lack of early identification at school—a pattern that is thankfully beginning to change—and on the other, societal pressures that push them to hide their achievements. Most girls are identified much later than would be desirable because they are well-behaved and don’t always show extraordinary academic results, so they go unnoticed. They seem to fit in, until many begin to develop psychosomatic symptoms—headaches, stomach aches, skin problems without a medical cause—resulting from a lack of intellectual stimulation in the classroom or the enormous effort they make every day to fit in with their peers. However, this distress is rarely expressed explicitly, as is often the case with many boys, who manifest it through disruptive behavior, rejection of authority, inattentiveness in class, or excessive activity. This leads families to seek help for boys sooner than for girls.

The challenge now is to detect these issues early and help women avoid trying to fit into a mold that isn’t their own; to support them in building—or, in many cases, rebuilding—a self-esteem that’s been damaged by years of self-denial. Many adults ask themselves, “Why do I need to know this now?” And our answer is clear: so they can reframe their own story through self-knowledge; so they can release guilt; so they can understand the reasons for their excessive demands, their perfectionism, their constant need for intellectual stimulation. Ultimately, for an adult woman, self-evaluation isn’t an end point, but the beginning of a process of personal integration: understanding herself, healing wounds, opening new paths, and, above all, allowing herself to be who she is without apologizing for it.

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