Internal Barriers to the Realization of Potential: Correlates and Interrelationships among Gifted and Talented Female Adolescents

Despite recent efforts to encourage and support women entering nontraditional careers, current statistics from the U.S. Department of Labor reveal that women remain grossly underrepresented in many general career areas, particularly in mathematics and the sciences. Indeed, since the 1920s, the status of gifted and talented women, with respect to career representation, has actually expe-rienced a decline from earlier periods in the 1900s in many technical and professional fields (Theodore, 1971; Tosi, 1975). Several internal, as well as external, barriers, to the realization of career potential among gifted and talented women have been identified which, in turn, at least partially account for such gross underrepresentation by women in many career areas. Underachievement in high school, while certainly not the