Robin Banerjee asks why very young children exhibit stereotyped ideas about gender roles.

Think for a moment about someone you know. How would you describe that person? You might refer to their relationship to you, their personality traits, their physical appearance, their occupation, and a multitude of other characteristics. But perhaps the most basic part of your description is whether that person is a man or a woman, a boy or a girl.

One reason why a person’s gender is so important to us is that it is linked to a large number of physical and psychological characteristics. Apart from anatomical differences between males and females, we often think of boys and men in terms of ‘masculine’ characteristics such as assertiveness, dominance, and competitiveness, while we think of girls and women in terms of ‘feminine’ characteristics such as compassion, warmth, and nurturance. Of course, these gender stereotypes don’t in fact apply to all males and all females, but for many centuries they have been a big part of our cultural beliefs about what it means to be a boy or girl.

But do children have similar ideas about gender? When and how do stereotypes about males and females emerge in childhood? Research by developmental psychologists has shown that children start to form strong stereotypes about boys/men and girls/women from a young age. As we will see, children begin to label themselves and others as male or female accurately from around 2 years of age, and soon after this begin to form clear links between these labels and different activities, toys, behaviours, and even adult occupations (e.g., girls/women play with dolls and can be nurses; boys/men play with cars and can be firefighters). In fact, the beliefs of children in these early years of childhood can be much more strongly stereotyped than the beliefs of most adults – parents often find that their children have more stereotyped attitudes about gender than they do themselves. Moreover, the children act on these stereotypes. Especially as young children begin to play more and more with peers of their own sex, we begin to see striking differences in the ways that boys and girls play and interact.

So where do these stereotyped beliefs and behaviours come from? An intuitively appealing explanation is that children are shaped by the cultural beliefs and practices of the society in which they grow up (e.g., via parenting, schooling, media influences etc.). For example, a boy might be actively encouraged by an adult or peer to play with ‘masculine’ toys and actively discouraged from playing with ‘feminine’ toys. In fact, the research evidence for these kinds of processes is rather mixed. Researchers have shown that parents often do not reward or punish boys’ and girls’ behaviour in systematically different ways. On the other hand, there are some illuminating findings which show that other people’s reactions to children’s behaviour can be very important. For example, children’s fathers and peers often react very negatively – sometimes with clear ridicule – to ‘gender-inappropriate’ behaviour (e.g., boys playing with feminine toys such as dolls).

At the same time, children may be influenced not just by other people’s reactions to their behaviour, but also by what they see around them every day. Despite the social changes over the last 50 years, it is still the case that fathers and mothers often play traditional roles (e.g., most childcare duties are still performed by women). Indeed, from the moment of birth, parents often create a different environment for their boys than for their girls – ranging from clothing and nursery decor choices to the provision of particular toys and activities. Furthermore, even if a child’s parents do not conform to gender stereotypes, other sources of influence, such as television and books, often present highly stereotyped images of men and women.

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