Female socialization stresses which of the following

From all these environmental influences, during their first years of life, children construct the gender schemes that will guide the elaboration of expectations about what society expects of men and women. In developmental psychology, the process of acquiring these schemes is called sex typing Bem, , and implies the application of gender stereotypes to multiple areas that range from material aspects that are differentially associated with one group or another colors, toys, or objects , to complex social constructions such as expectations in regard to personality, skills, or professions that men and women carry out Jackson, ; Wilbourn and Kee, ; Patterson, This causes an earlier acquisition of stereotypes associated with men by boys, and with women by girls, giving priority to those that are most useful for building their own identity Bem, ; Liben and Bigler, c.

Developmental studies that have been carried out on this subject therefore seem to indicate that we are faced with a multidimensional construct that is acquired gradually Liben and Bigler, c ; Halim et al.

Around the age of 3, children seem to clearly understand that the world is divided between men and women, and that they belong to one of those categories.

From the moment in which they acquire the notion of gender constancy Ruble et al. Thus, what some authors call gender rigidity appears Halim, , which leads to gender differentiation to become especially strict during these years.

Children begin to progressively associate professions, skills and objects in a biased way in line with the cultural knowledge they have absorbed Jackson, ; Bian et al. The phenomenon of gender typing usually progresses throughout the primary school stage 6—11 years , when the stiffness of the traditional roles that apply to themselves and the rest begins to decrease Trautner et al. From this moment on, if cognitive progress continues and learning environments are sufficiently egalitarian, stereotypes tend to become more flexible and roles blur Bennett and Sani, ; Halim, However, as is obvious, in many cases stereotypes also persist throughout life and continue to influence the behavior of adolescents and adults.

The developmental pattern described has been confirmed in multiple investigations that have been carried out in recent decades with children from different cultures, although as mentioned before there are differences in the developmental course of the different components associated with gender schemes, as this is a multifaceted construct personal attributes, professions, skills, objects, etc.

In addition, the developmental course varies significantly when we talk about aspects associated with masculinity, compared to the characteristics that are usually associated with femininity.

The data seem to indicate that, in a general way, the professions, objects or attributes associated with men tend to be more rigid, punishing more radically the behaviors that transgress gender mandates for men in some way Wilbourn and Kee, In this sense, an asymmetry of gender stereotypes exists: gender stereotyping is less restrictive for female stereotypes than for male stereotypes Wilbourn and Kee, ; Siyanova-Chanturia et al.

In addition, several studies indicate that girls generally show more flexible gender stereotypes than boys Shen-Miller et al. Furthermore, there are important differences in the development of gender differentiation between boys and girls, undoubtedly related to the social position they occupy. For example, both groups tend to associate positive characteristics preferentially with their own group, but after the age of 6 girls stop showing this pattern and mostly consider that something that requires a lot of intelligence should preferably be done by a man Bian et al.

The results of the study might be helpful when designing educational and policy interventions in order to eliminate gender stereotyping as soon as possible, before those social shared schemes have been irrevocably internalized by the children. The participants were school children from a public primary school in the Community of Madrid in an area of medium socioeconomic status. A first interval included 4- and 5-year-old participants and consisted of 22 boys and 27 girls.

The next interval covered the range of 6- and 7-year-olds and consisted of 40 boys and 27 girls. The third interval, the 8- and 9-year-olds, included 16 boys and 17 girls. Two types of tasks were developed specifically for this study: Task 1, aimed at assessing stereotypes related to typically female or male personal attributes, and Task 2, designed to identify stereotypes related to professional roles. Supplementary Material includes the instructions used to apply both tasks.

The personal attributes selected for this study were: smart, kind, aggressive, vain, happy and grumpy. These attributes were chosen from the Bem Sex Role Inventory BSRI Bem, , including a positive and a negative attribute for each category, as well as characteristics that could be understood by the children of these ages. According to this instrument, the smart and aggressive attributes are stereotypically masculine adjectives, while the kind and vain attributes are typically feminine.

The happy and grumpy attributes would be considered neutral they are not culturally associated with either the male or the female gender. The procedure for applying the task was based on the one used in a recent study that had similar objectives 2. Each participant was told six stories in which the protagonist was a very smart, kind, aggressive, vain, happy or grumpy person. This task had two versions: one in which the protagonist was an adult man or woman and another in which the protagonist was a child boy or girl.

The participants had to choose, in different tests, between four images of adults two women and two men and four images of children two boys and two girls , who they considered the protagonist of the different stories was.

The stories are described in more detail in the next section. The photographs of men, women, boys, and girls used for the smart and kind attributes were taken, with prior consent of the authors, from the study carried out by Bian et al. To do this, 16 photos of men, 16 of women, 16 of boys and 16 of girls were located in a databases of free-use photographs. All subjects were approximately the same age, appeared in the photograph only in portrait format mainly the face and some of the upper body and were smiling.

The photos were included in a questionnaire applied through the Google Form tool to 55 adults, who were asked to rate the level of physical attractiveness of each person from 1 to 4. Of the 64 photographs included in the previous study, 32 were selected for this study: 8 photographs of men, 8 of women, 8 of boys and 8 of girls. These photographs were added to the previous 16, so a total of 48 photographs distributed in 12 tests were finally used 6 with adult photos and 6 with children photos.

For each attribute, 4 cards were presented for the adult attributes version, 2 photographs of men and 2 photographs of women; for the children attributes version, 2 photographs of boys and 2 of girls.

With this task, three different scores were calculated:. Male roles attributed to men measured the degree of stereotyping of male attributes. To calculate the corresponding score, each time a participant chose the photograph that corresponded to the stereotype, it was scored with a 1. For example, if a characteristic stereotypically attributed to men, such as aggressive, was being assessed, and the participant attributed that feature to the photo of a man or a boy, it was assigned a score of 1 in that test.

Subsequently, a proportion of the biased responses on the total male attributes, which ranged from 0 to 1, was calculated in order to compare the scores obtained in all tasks on the same scale. Female roles attributed to women measured the degree of stereotyping of female attributes. For its calculation, a criterion similar to that previously mentioned was followed, but in this case in relation to female attributes.

Stereotyped roles attributed to men and women measured the degree of global stereotyping with respect to gender, applied to men and women as a whole. In this case, the score was also calculated proportionally at a value of 0 to 1, which summarizes the degree to which the participants apply the gender scheme when assigning attributes associated with masculinity and femininity.

Task 2 is adapted from the professional role attribution instrument included in the work of Liben and Bigler f. Each card contained a representative drawing of the professions with objects associated with them for example, a bouquet of flowers for the florist profession. Information on the following variables was obtained with the administration of this task.

Male professions attributed to men measured the degree of stereotyping of masculinized professions police, ship captain, scientist and computer specialist. Female professions attributed to women measured the degree of stereotyping of feminized professions nurse, cashier, florist and hairdresser. Stereotyped professions attributed to men and women measured the degree of global stereotyping regarding gender in the professional domain, applied to men and women as a whole.

In this case, the score was also calculated proportionally at a value of 0 to 1, which summarizes the degree to which the participants apply gender schemes when giving their opinion about who should perform different types of strongly stereotyped professions. To codify these variables, the criteria proposed by the creators of the measure 4 were followed.

The scores were obtained by calculating the proportion of stereotyped responses in each case. Higher values in these variables indicate greater gender stereotyping. To complement the results of the stereotyped responses observed in this task, several measures that represent the degree of flexibility when applying gender schemes to professions were also calculated following Liben and Bigler f.

Thus, proportional scores with values from 0 to 1 were recalculated for three specific areas:. Flexibility male professions measured the degree of flexibility of typically male professions. Global flexibility measured the combined degree of flexibility, both for typically male and typically female professions. The participants performed the tasks in classrooms of their school that met the necessary conditions of space, silence, and luminosity to conduct the interviews and outside of their usual school hours.

In the task related to personal attributes, the application procedure was similar to the one applied in the original study by Bian et al.

For each attribute, a story was told in which the protagonist stood out because of this specific attribute. But there is one particular person who is different. That person is very, very vain. This person looks constantly in the mirror and worries about whether their hair and clothes look good.

This person is quite vain. Who do you think, out of these 4 people, is the vain person from the story? When the participants pointed to one of the photos, the response was recorded, and the next story began. In both versions, the traits evaluated were the same, using stories adapted for adulthood and childhood, in the same order of presentation.

In each test the four photographs were presented randomly for each participant and for each attribute. Regarding the procedure for applying task 2, the same procedure proposed by Liben and Bigler f was applied, accompanied by the visual support cards.

In this case, participants were explained that they would be presented with different cards with drawings related to different professions. The task was to decide if they considered that this profession should be carried out only by men, only by women, or by both, by placing the card of each profession on the table space occupied by the silhouettes already described.

The order of appearance of the cards was as follows: nurse, police, cashier, artist, ship captain, florist, scientist, baker, hairdresser, computer specialist, interspersing typically male, female and neutral professions randomly. Is it a profession that only men should do, only women, or that both should?

Table 1 presents the proportion of tests in which the participants assigned both male and female attributes to the two types of targets, including in all cases the photos of adults and those of children as a whole. Table 1. The data therefore confirmed the biased assignment of personal attributes to unknown people, both adults and children. Table 2 summarizes the scores regarding the assignment of professions to men, women, or both. This score indicates a remarkable flexibility in the professional area.

Table 2. Diving in to a more precise analysis of the specific professions included in this study, the most biased professions that can be observed in the case of the male gender see Figure 1 were those of police On the other hand, the professions most linked to women see Figure 2 were those of florist Table 3 shows the information related to gender differences in all the variables of interest. To simplify the analysis of the results and given that the attribute scores assigned to masculine targets and feminine targets in each case are complementary, only the stereotyped attributes of each personal attribute are presented.

The results indicate that boys stereotype more male attributes by assigning them more to boys than girls [ t Table 4 shows the results for the three age groups. The results of the ANOVA, applied to compare the statistics of the three groups, are also included in the table, in addition to the corresponding post hoc test when significant age differences were found.

As can be seen in the table, significant differences appear in the stereotyped assignment of male attributes to men. Specifically, the internalization of these schemes seems to increase with age, being only the differences between the youngest and oldest group significant. Regarding the other two scores related to personal attributes, there are no significant differences between the three age groups, the attribution of female roles to women and the total stereotyping score of personality attributes being stable.

The univariate analysis does not yield significant interactions between gender and age group for any of the variables related to Task 1. Regarding the assignment of male professions to men, there are no significant differences between the different age groups.

A univariate analysis of variance, including age and gender subgroups, was performed to analyze the possible interaction between these two variables. Figure 3. However, the corresponding post hoc test indicates that the differences between groups turn out to be significant only between the youngest and the in-between children, on the one hand, compared to the oldest. Figure 4. An increase in flexibility is observed as the age of the participants increases especially among boys.

Post hoc tests indicate, as can be seen in the table, that the differences between the age groups were significant between the youngest and the oldest flexibility for male professions and between the youngest and the other two groups flexibility for female professions.

A correlational analysis of all the scores calculated in Tasks 1 and 2 was performed. This result shows that participants who stereotype the professions considered more typically male tend to do the same for professions usually considered female.

For the rest of the scores, there is no significant relationship between the variables, which reveals that these are independent variables when all participants are considered as a group. When the sample is divided into different groups and the sociodemographic variables gender and age group considered in this study are included in the analysis, interesting results appear in the specific correlations of the different subgroups.

On the other hand, dividing the sample into the three age groups that have participated in the study, no significant correlations are found between any of the measures included in the study for the youngest group. Moreover, in the group of older participants, significant relationships are observed among other variables.

This relationship is not observed for the relationship between personal attributes associated with femininity and the responses of participants in the field of feminized professions. The results confirmed that the children between 4 and 9 years of age who took part in our study have generally internalized gender schemes, which they clearly make use of when assigning personal attributes or professional roles.

However, these general results have slight variations and different developmental trajectories between the boy and girl groups, as well as in the relationship to masculinity and femininity, following the line of multiple previous studies carried out in this area Levy and Sadovsky, ; Liben and Bigler, b ; Jackson, ; Miller et al.

As it will be thoroughly described above, most of the findings of the present study are similar to the ones obtained in previous researches with children in another countries, although the heterogeneity of measures makes difficult in some cases to obtain clear conclusions about the generalization of them.

As recent previous studies have shown Liben and Bigler, b ; Siyanova-Chanturia et al. This indicates that boys and girls pay more attention to the traits associated with their own group.

They internalize them earlier and incorporate them as more rigid schemes when it comes to creating expectations regarding unknown people. Given that the construction of this scheme occurs in parallel to gender identity development, it is more efficient for girls, from an adaptive point of view, to pay attention to what society expects of them because they are women.

This acquisition allows them to incorporate these expectations into their own identity, in the same way that happens to boys. Incorporating specific gender roles at such early ages for example, associating aggressiveness with masculinity and lower intelligence to women , in parallel to the development of gender identity, is something that can have obvious implications for children as it adds constraints to their development at such an early stage Bem, ; Brinkman et al.

Moreover, the biased responses in the assignment of personal attributes were more frequent for male attributes, although the difference does not have a sufficient level of significance.

However, previous research done in this area confirms that gender roles are generally more rigid for men than for women, so we can confirm that this greater lack of flexibility associated with masculinity is already perceived and internalized by our participants in the first years of life Wilbourn and Kee, ; Siyanova-Chanturia et al.

Nevertheless, it must be noted that other studies have found the opposite result Halim et al. The fact that in a very high proportion of the tests almost three quarters of them intelligence was assigned to boys has undeniable consequences for the development of girls, as described in other previous studies with similar results Bian et al. If girls perceive that very intelligent people are usually men, they will tend to apply that association to their own self-concept and will project expectations aligned with this association which reinforces their low presence in STEM careers, as well as a worse self-perception of personal skills to face general problems, because intelligence is a necessary attribute for all areas of life.

Data obtained in multiple studies indicate that these types of expectations often function as a self-fulfilling prophecy, especially in situations in which girls feel that they are being evaluated, which reduces their performance in objective evaluation tests Jussim et al. It should also be noted that an important part of the responses indicate that aggressiveness is also a trait strongly associated with masculinity, as found in previous studies Baker et al.

This seems to confirm that children perceive, from a very young age, that men tend to be more aggressive than women, a characteristic that can undoubtedly be found at the root of phenomena such as gender violence.

Although in this study the participants have been asked to generate expectations about the presented targets appropriation of culturally shared roles and have not explicitly been asked whether these types of behaviors are adequate, the data show that from an early age children perceive this behavior as an attribute more associated with normative masculinity, with the implications that this has for the socio-emotional development of both groups.

Boys seem to assume early on that aggressiveness is more frequent among their peers and male adults, while girls also perceive that difference, which they may find inevitable. It is convenient to consider this perception when designing strategies to prevent gender violence and any form of sexual abuse, taking away the normality surrounding this issue and teaching children that it is a cultural aspect that can be avoided.

The educational objective in these cases will be to provide boys with alternative strategies to manage conflicts and to promote in all children a critical analysis of media messages that often idealize violence associated with masculinity compared to other forms of solving non-violent problems, such as negotiation or cooperation.

Regarding women, they seem to be perceived by the participants as much more concerned about their physical appearance than men. If girls internalize early on that women naturally care a lot about their image, they are more likely to feel insecure with their physical appearance and develop a more negative body image by comparing how they look with prevailing beauty canons. This aspect is at the base of various mental health problems such as eating disorders, much more frequent among women than among men Baker et al.

In this regard, learning environments should foster a more polyhedral image of women, cultivating the development of skills that are not focused on physical appearance and taking importance away from their looks. Contexts that stimulate the development of skills and competencies in all areas and foster a body experience based on enjoyment and personal acceptance for example, through participation in sports or physical activities will foster a positive experience and care of the body that goes beyond the socially established beauty canon.

Regarding the application of gender schemes to the analyzed professions, it should be noted that an important part of the participants considered that the professions presented should be carried out interchangeably by men and women Liben and Bigler, d. This result seems to be related to the multidimensionality of the development of gender schemes Liben and Bigler, b , e , noting that the application of these schemes may vary depending on the domain in which they are applied, and the type of response options presented.

However, the data show the application of a non-negligible amount of traditional gender stereotypes when assigning professions. As in the task of personal attributes, there is a greater stereotyping of the male professions than of the female professions, again confirming the appearance of a gender asymmetry Wilbourn and Kee, ; Siyanova-Chanturia et al.

The professional field seems to be, as the personal one, more rigid with respect to masculine-related schemes than with those associated with traditional feminine schemes. On the other hand, although the participants also applied gender biases when analyzing female professions for example, more than half of the responses reported that the florist profession should be carried out only by women , the girls were slightly more rigid than boys when considering such professions.

By the time they are three years old, they have formed their gender identity. They also begin to learn cultural gender stereotypes: that certain behaviours, activities, toys and interests are typical for boys and girls.

Although children play an active role in shaping their gender identity development, their knowledge about gender comes from many sources of socialization, including parents, peers and teachers. Parents provide children with their first lessons about gender. Although gender-egalitarian attitudes have increased in many cultures over the past decades, parents and especially fathers typically have different expectations for their sons and daughters with regard to personality traits, abilities and activities.

Nowadays, most women pursue jobs outside of the home, and men are increasingly involved in child care and housework. Another important way in which children learn about gender is through their interactions with peers. During early childhood, children prefer to play with peers who share similar interests or who they believe share those interests, and thus are more likely to be socialized by their same gender peers.

While spending time with their friends, boys and girls learn what is appropriate for one gender or the other. This gender socialization can be direct or indirect. Likewise, children learn and adopt gender-stereotypical behaviours boy-typical versus girl-typical behaviours as they spend more time interacting with members of their own gender. In addition to parents and peers, teachers are another source of gender socialization.

Similar to parents, teachers have gender expectations, model gender roles, and reinforce gender-stereotypical behaviours in their classrooms. For example, educators may reinforce gender stereotypes by labelling and organizing students in group activities or by creating different activity centres for boys and girls.

Parents and service providers are encouraged to provide children with a wide range of toys and activities during early childhood. Likewise, it is recommended that parents and teachers create playful environments where children interact positively with both boys and girls. These interactions would help children to develop skills to interact effectively in mixed-gender groups and to gain a better understanding of gender differences and similarities. In fact, parents, educators and practitioners are highly encouraged to pay attention to the stereotypic beliefs children express regarding each gender, as some may foster negative behaviours and attitudes against the other gender.

This concern can be addressed by exposing children to counter-stereotypic models e. Indeed, it is recommended that parents and educators discuss and challenge gender stereotypes with children e. Very early on young children can already make the difference between males and females, and by age 3 they know their own gender. Peer socialization of gender in young boys and girls. Individual health is determined by a myriad of factors. Interestingly, simply being male or female is one such factor that carries profound implications for one's well-being.

Intriguing differences between men and women have been observed with respect to vulnerability to and prevalence of particular illnesses.