The Relation of Gender Understanding to Children's Sex-Typed Preferences and Gender Stereotypes

Martin, Carol Lynn; Little, Jane K.

doi:10.2307/1130753

Cited by 88 publications

(40 citation statements)

References 19 publications

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“…Martin and Little (1990) found that gender stability was related to both children's gender knowledge and gender-linked preferences. From as young as 30 months children chose to play with same-sex toys.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 98%

Self-Regulatory Mechanisms Governing Gender Development

Bussey¹,

Bandura²

1992

Child Development

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This study tested predictions about development of gender-related thought and action from social cognitive theory. Children at 4 levels of gender constancy were assessed for their gender knowledge, personal gender standards, and gender-linked behavior under different situational conditions. Irrespective of gender constancy level, all children engaged in more same-sex than cross-sex typed behavior. Younger children reacted in a gender stereotypic manner to peers' gender-linked behavior but did not regulate their own behavior on the basis of personal gender standards. Older children exhibited substantial self-regulatory guidance based on personal standards. They expressed anticipatory self-approval for same-sex typed behavior and self-criticism for cross-sex typed behavior. Their anticipatory self-sanctions, in turn, predicted their actual gender-linked behavior. Neither gender knowledge nor gender constancy predicted gender-linked behavior. These results lend support to social cognitive theory that evaluation and regulation of gender-linked conduct shifts developmentally from anticipatory social sanctions to anticipatory self-sanctions rooted in personal standards.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 98%

Self-Regulatory Mechanisms Governing Gender Development

Bussey¹,

Bandura²

1992

Child Development

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“…This observed cross-gender effect might be due to the universal sex-typed behavior and preference for same-sex peers (Martin & Little, 1990; Bukowski, Gauze, Hoza, & Newcomb, 1993) that emerges during the preschool years and develops throughout childhood (Maccoby & Jacklin, 1987; Serbin, Powlishta, & Gulko, 1993; Serbin & Sprafkin, 1986). This universal sex segregation among children might have resulted in differential experience with same-sex and different-sex faces, which in turn explain adolescents’ superior recognition of familiar same-sex peers.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

An inner face advantage in children’s recognition of familiar peers

Anzures

Wang

et al. 2008

Journal of Experimental Child Psychology

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Children's recognition of familiar own-age peers was investigated. Four-, 8-, and 14-year-old Chinese children were asked to identify their classmates from photographs showing the entire face, the internal facial features only, the external facial features only, or the eyes, nose, or mouth only. Participants from all age groups were familiar with the faces used as stimuli for one academic year. The results showed that children from all age groups demonstrated an advantage for recognition of the internal facial features relative to their recognition of the external facial features. Previous observations of a shift in reliance from external to internal facial features can, thus, be attributed to experience with faces rather than to age-related changes in face processing.Faces are one of the most important classes of visual stimuli in one's social life. Faces contain socially relevant information, some of which are relatively permanent and stable (i.e., "face traits"), such as gender, race, and identity, while others are dynamic and transient (i.e., "face states"), such as gaze and emotion (Freire & Lee, 2003).A review of the literature on the development of face trait processing shows that the majority of studies focus on the processing of configural information (i.e., the spacing between facial features) due to the controversial encoding switch hypothesis Flin, 1985). This hypothesis proposes a shift in reliance from isolated features among young children to a later reliance on configural information among older children. Earlier studies specifically found that young children rely more on isolated features such as paraphernalia (e.g., clothing, or presence of hat or glasses) in their recognition of faces . Other studies, however, have found Address Correspondence to: Gizelle Anzures, Department of Human Development and Applied Psychology, OISE/University of Toronto, 252 Bloor St. West, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M5S 1V6, e-mail: gizelle.anzures@utoronto.ca. Publisher's Disclaimer: This is a PDF file of an unedited manuscript that has been accepted for publication. As a service to our customers we are providing this early version of the manuscript. The manuscript will undergo copyediting, typesetting, and review of the resulting proof before it is published in its final citable form. Please note that during the production process errors may be discovered which could affect the content, and all legal disclaimers that apply to the journal pertain. NIH Public Access NIH-PA Author ManuscriptNIH-PA Author Manuscript NIH-PA Author Manuscript limited susceptibility to paraphernalia when paraphernalia was included with the target stimulus and with facial stimuli at test (Baenninger, 1994), or when featural rather than configural changes to faces are made (Freire & Lee, 2001). Despite the controversy over the timing of its initial emergence (Baenninger, 1994;Freire & Lee, 2001;McKone & Boyer, 2006;Pellicano, Rhodes, & Peters, 2006), studies have found that adult-like sensitivity to face configural information takes ...

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“…These gender inequalities matter to society because, as experimental research has shown, gender biases in books influence children's preferences, self‐concepts, and activities. Studies have demonstrated that exposure to gender stereotypic reading materials results in children conforming to such roles (Fagot and Leinbach ; Martin and Little ). Similarly, Schau and Scott () found children's books that contain traditional gender stereotyping increased children's gendered understandings related to occupational interests, emotional disposition, and spheres of activity and play.…”

Section: Review Of the Literaturementioning

confidence: 99%

Perpetuating Stereotypes: A Study of Gender, Family, and Religious Life in Jewish Children's Books

Sigalow

Fox

2014

Scientific Study of Religion

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This paper examines award-winning Jewish children's literature as a medium to explore how religiosity gets constructed differently for men and women. We analyze three decades of winners of the Sydney Taylor Jewish Book Award, a prestigious annual award given by the Association of Jewish Libraries to an outstanding Jewish children's book. We demonstrate how these award-winning books produce and perpetuate gendered religious stereotypes that associate men with agency and women with communion. We also show how these books construct images of a "domestic Judaism" for women and a "public Judaism" for men and how women have been symbolically annihilated from the titles and central character roles in these books. Drawing on Cecilia Ridgeway's (2011) gender-framing perspective, we argue that the gender stereotypes evident in these books matter to society because they produce and enforce gender inequalities in religiousness. Keywords: gender, family, Judaism. INTRODUCTIONIn the June 2009 issue of JSSR, scholars engaged in a lively debate about the benefits and perils of recent research on gender, religion, and risk-aversion theory. Gender and religion scholar, Marie Cornwall (2009), then editor of the journal, authored a short response raising questions about risk preference approaches, taking them to task for reifying sex differences and proceeding without the insights of recent gender scholarship. Cornwall concluded her note by inviting scholars to pursue a more productive line of inquiry about gender and religion that focuses on the "gendering processes that constitute religious expression, experience, and religiosity differently for women and men " (2009:254). Answering her invitation, we explore the workings of one particular gendering process, the transmission of religious knowledge and ideas through Jewish children's books, as a way to refocus light on the social and cultural mechanisms that produce religious differences among men and women.Despite compelling evidence that the religious gender gap is not universal and depends largely upon the measures of religiosity used to demonstrate it as so (Cornwall 1989;Steggerda 1993;Sullins 2006), the majority of recent research on religion and gender has proceeded from the assumption that higher female religiousness is a commonly accepted fact (Collett and Lizardo 2009; Miller and Hoffman 1995;Stark 2002;Walter and Davie 1998 why women are (seemingly) more religious than men (see Sullins 2006 for overview). We worrylike Cornwall (2009)-that this current line of thinking both reifies cultural beliefs about men and women and reinforces researchers' own taken-for-granted assumptions about gender differences. In this article, we thus direct conversation about religion and gender in a new direction. Rather than asking why women are more religious than men (and assuming, a priori, that they are), we ask how religiosity, as a gendered construct, gets produced differently for men and women and why these differences matter to society. In our analysis of the content, pictures, and...

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The Relation of Gender Understanding to Children's Sex-Typed Preferences and Gender Stereotypes

Cited by 88 publications

References 19 publications

Self-Regulatory Mechanisms Governing Gender Development

Self-Regulatory Mechanisms Governing Gender Development

An inner face advantage in children’s recognition of familiar peers

Perpetuating Stereotypes: A Study of Gender, Family, and Religious Life in Jewish Children's Books

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