Sarah-Jane Leslie is the Class of 1943 Professor of Philosophy and former Dean of the Graduate School at Princeton University,[1] where she is also affiliated faculty in the Department of Psychology,[2] the Kahneman-Treisman Center for Behavioral Science and Public Policy,[3] the Program in Cognitive Science, the Program in Linguistics, and the University Center for Human Values.

Much of her work has focused on generic generalizations, which are articulated in language via sentences such as "tigers are striped", "a duck lays eggs", "mosquitoes carry West Nile virus".

[5] These sentences are difficult to analyze from the perspective of formal semantics, but are nonetheless easy for young children to acquire and process.

[29][30][31] More recently, Leslie and NYU psychologist Andrei Cimpian have studied the impact of stereotypes that link brilliance with men more so than women.

[32] In a 2015 paper published in Science, they found that academic disciplines that are perceived to require brilliance for success have larger gender gaps, even when adjusting for standardized test scores and other factors.

[8][33] In subsequent work, they found that even the frequency of adjectives like "brilliant" and "genius" in teaching evaluations can predict how diverse an academic field is.

In an article published in Science in 2017 with psychologist Lin Bian,[35] they found that girls begin to absorb stereotypes linking brilliance with males by age 6.