Gender Differences in Creativity Among Young Elite Judoka Athletes

Creativity is a multidimensional concept that can be described as a cognitive ability that leads to the production of an original and valuable product. This ability relies on divergent thinking, which enables multi-dimensional and multi-directional thinking, thus enabling the creation of new ideas/new ways of dealing with different situations. Motor creativity is the ability to select and execute diverse and different motor solutions for a given situation, and is an important feature of daily life, especially for performance in sports. The aim of the present study is to explore gender differences in creativity among elite athletes in judo. Judo is a popular and accomplished sport in Israeli sports. Seventy-seven elite judo athletes (32 females and 45 males) aged 16-25 participated in the current study. Participants performed a divergent thinking test and motor creativity test. It was found that self-esteem of creativity among males was higher than self-esteem among girls. However, coaches evaluated both males and females as moderately creative. Females scored higher on all divergent thinking dimensions compared to males. These differences were significant for the flexibility dimension (p = .016) and approach significance for the flexibility dimension (p = .090) in motor creativity. In verbal divergent thinking, these differences were significant for fluency (p=.05) and flexibility (p = .020), and approached the significance for originality (p = .098).