Creative thinking is one of the conditions that enables researchers to conduct innovative scientific research and is often seen as a criterium to evaluate the quality of researchers. Based on a serie of five studies, the ability to think creative (‘outside-the-box’) is found to be systematically more associated with men than with women.
Proudfoot, D., Kay, A. C., & Koval, C. Z. (2015). A gender bias in the attribution of creativity: Archival and experimental evidence for the perceived association between masculinity and creative thinking. Psychological Science, 26(11), 1751-1761. https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797615598739