Around forty years ago, developmental psychologists began to identify important changes in how children think about gender between the ages of 2 and 7 years. They did this by asking children questions such as:

o Are you a girl or a boy?
o Is this a girl or a boy? (showing boy/girl doll)
o When you were a little baby were you a little girl or a little boy?
o When you grow up, will you be a mummy or a daddy?’
o Could you ever be a [opposite of previous response]?
o If you wore [opposite of child’s sex] clothes, would you be a girl or a boy?’

The researchers found that children are able to correctly label themselves and others as male or female at a young age, around 2 to 3 years of age. But at this age, children’s understanding of gender is quite limited – they often don’t understand that gender is stable over time and that it can’t be changed by a superficial transformation of appearance (such as changing clothes). A little later, children show an awareness that gender is stable over time (e.g., a boy can’t grow up to be a mummy). But it is later still, at around age 6 or 7, that children show a full understanding of gender as a permanent characteristic that can’t be changed by making superficial transformations of appearance.

Psychologists initially thought that it isn’t until the final stage – when they have the full understanding of gender as permanent – that children start to show a strong motivation to discover and adopt masculine and feminine stereotypes. Since then, however, many researchers have shown that children actively begin to seek out information about what it means to be a boy or girl as soon as they are able to label themselves and others as male or female accurately. In other words, from around 3 years of age, children are themselves motivated to find out about masculine vs. feminine toys, activities, behaviours, and occupations.

In some ways, young children’s gender stereotypes may be the result of an effort to simplify a very complex world. Young children hold such strong stereotypes about gender precisely because having highly structured notions of what boys and girls do and like helps them to make sense of the world around them. So when a researcher presents a 5-year-old with a counterstereotypical boy (e.g., who likes to play with toy prams), the 5-year-old might still predict that the boy would prefer to play with aeroplanes than with dolls. Similarly, researchers have found that young children often distort memories of counterstereotypical images so that they conform to gender stereotypes (e.g., they might see a picture of a girl sawing wood, but later remember it as a picture of a boy sawing wood). As they grow older, however, children become able to hold a more complex and sophisticated view of the world, and can therefore recognise that stereotypes don’t apply to everyone.

There remain many challenges and unresolved questions for researchers today: Why are some children so much more concerned about fitting in with gender stereotypes than others? What can we do about gender stereotypes that lead to problems such as academic underperformance and aggressive behaviour? But the last fifty years of research have made it clear that in order to answer these kinds of questions, we have to look at both environmental influences (from parents, peers, media etc.) and aspects of the child’s own thinking.

You can read more about this in the sample extract from a chapter Robin Banerjee has recently completed as part of a new textbook for the Open University course ED209 Child Development, Cognition and Gender Development