Gender schema theory
Despite the limited research evidence for the role of gender constancy in the development of gender-typed behaviour, many contemporary researchers have built on Kohlberg’s basic point that cognitive processes play a key role in driving gender development. In fact, the question now is not whether cognition is important – everyone agrees that it is – but which particular cognitions should be emphasised. Where Kohlberg highlighted the relatively late-developing full understanding of gender constancy, the gender schema theorists argue that it is the early cognitive processes underlying children’s ability to label themselves as boys or girls that play the key role in gender development (Martin et al., 2002).In 1981, Carol Martin and Charles Halverson presented a new account of gender typing that drew on the ideas of earlier cognitive developmental accounts but included considerably more detail about the exact cognitive processes involved in gender development (Martin and Halverson, 1981). They proposed that the emergence of stereotypes in childhood was not purely a function of environmental input, but rather was the perfectly normal consequence of children’s information-processing. Stereotypes, in this view, are simply an efficient way of handling and predicting large amounts of information. If we do not categorise information and make generalisations (e.g. about what boys like and what girls like) on that basis, we simply would not be able to manage our lives effectively. For children exposed to an endless stream of new information and novel input, such processes of simplification are necessary in order to make sense of the complex world around them.
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