This paper considers the effects of children's gender associations on their preferences for musical instruments, and questions whether the limited range of instrumental selection made by boys can be regarded as a result of such associations.The research project was devised to investigate the responses of infant school children to male and female musicians. The findings indicated that instrumental preferences were influenced by gender associations which could be lessened by providing positive role models. Whereas girls were more able to cross over gender divisions than boys, boys had a narrower range of interests in instruments. It was shown that the provision of an opposite gendered role model helped to overcome the associations made with particular instruments.

In this article we seek to assess the usefulness of the work done by psychologists to explain the sex/gender paradox in music. Whilst not pretending to be an exhaustive review, by tracing the quest as it has been tackled over the past 80 or so years, the principal issues to emerge fall into two categories. On the one hand there are areas in which clear gains appear to have been made, highlighting preferences such as those for different musical characteristics, styles and particular instruments, and the contribution made by investigating personality traits. On the other, however, there are important influences which contribute to gender formation which have remained largely unexplored in music education research, such as race/ethnicity, class and home circumstances, sexuality, disability, birth ordinal position and birth date, as well as the frustratingly inconclusive studies of the functions of brain lateralisation. Thus we reason that psychologists researching music education need to widen their attention to aspects of both difference and absence, acknowledging the real world contexts in which people make musical meanings.