In other words, colour-coding for boys and girls once quite openly served the purpose of helping young children learn gender distinctions. Today, the original objective behind the convention has been forgotten. Yet it continues to accomplish exactly that, together with other habits we have that also draw children’s attention to gender, as a number of developmental psychologists have insightfully argued.5
Imagine, for a moment, that we could tell at birth (or even before) whether a child was left-handed or right-handed. By convention, the parents of left-handed babies dress them in pink clothes, wrap them in pink blankets and decorate their rooms with pink hues. The left-handed baby’s bottle, bibs and dummies – and later, cups, plates and utensils, lunch box and backpack – are often pink or purple with motifs such as butterflies, flowers and fairies. Parents tend to let the hair of left-handers grow long, and while it is still short in babyhood a barrette or bow (often pink) serves as a stand-in. Right-handed babies, by contrast, are never dressed in pink; nor do they ever have pink accessories or toys. Although blue is a popular colour for right-handed babies, as they get older any colour, excluding pink or purple, is acceptable. Clothing and other items for right-handed babies and children commonly portray vehicles, sporting equipment and space rockets; never butterflies, flowers or fairies. The hair of right-handers is usually kept short and is never prettified with accessories.
Nor do parents just segregate left- and right-handers symbolically, with colour and motif, in our imaginary world. They also distinguish between them verbally. ‘Come on, left-handers!’ cries out the mother of two left-handed children in the park. ‘Time to go home.’ Or they might say, ‘Well, go and ask that right-hander if you can have a turn on the swing now.’ At playgroup, children overhear comments like, ‘Left-handers love drawing, don’t they?’, and ‘Are you hoping for a right-hander this time?’ to a pregnant mother. At preschool, the teacher greets them with a cheery, ‘Good morning, left-handers and right-handers.’ In the supermarket, a father says proudly in response to a polite enquiry, ‘I’ve got three children altogether: one left-hander and two right-handers.’
And finally, although left-handers and right-handers happily live together in homes and communities, children can’t help but notice that elsewhere they are often physically segregated. The people who care for them – primary caregivers, child care workers and kindergarten teachers, for example – are almost all left-handed, while building sites and garbage trucks are peopled by right-handers. Public toilets, sports teams, many adult friendships and even some schools, are segregated by handedness.
You get the idea.
It’s not hard to imagine that, in such a society, even very young children would soon learn that there are two categories of people – right-handers and left-handers – and would quickly become proficient in using markers like clothing and hairstyle to distinguish between the two kinds of children and adults. But also, it seems more than likely that children would also come to think that there must be something fundamentally important about whether one is a right-hander or a left-hander, since so much fuss and emphasis is put on the distinction. Children will, one would imagine, want to know what it means to be someone of a particular handedness and to learn what sets apart a child of one handedness from those with a preference for the other hand.
We tag gender in exactly these ways, all of the time. Anyone who spends time around children will know how rare it is to come across a baby or child whose sex is not labelled by clothing, hairstyle or accessories. Anyone with ears can hear how adults constantly label gender with words: he, she, man, woman, boy, girl and so on. And we do this even when we don’t have to. Mothers reading picture books, for instance, choose to refer to storybook characters by gender labels (like woman) twice as often as they choose nongendered alternatives (like teacher or person).6 Just as if adults were always referring to people as left-handers or right-handers (or Anglos and Latinos, or Jews and Catholics), this also helps to draw attention to gender as an important way of dividing up the social world into categories.
This tagging of gender – especially different conventions for male and female dress, hairstyle, accessories and use of makeup – may well help children to learn how to divvy up the people around them by sex. We’ve seen that babies as young as three to four months old can discriminate between males and females. At just ten months old, babies have developed the ability to make mental notes regarding what goes along with being male or female: they will look longer, in surprise, at a picture of a man with an object that was previously only paired with women, and vice versa.7 This means that children are well-placed, early on, to start learning the gender ropes. As they approach their second birthday, children are already starting to pick up the rudiments of gender stereotyping. There’s some tentative evidence that they know for whom fire hats, dolls, makeup and so on are intended before their second birthday.8 And at around this time, children start to use gender labels themselves and are able to say to which sex they themselves belong.9
It’s at this critical point in their toddler years that children lose their status as objective observers. It is hard to merely dispassionately note what is for boys and what is for girls once you realise that you are a boy (or a girl) yourself. Once children have personally relevant boxes in which to file what they learn (labelled ‘Me’ versus ‘Not Me’), this adds an extra oomph to the drive to solve the mysteries of gender.10 Developmental psychologists Carol Martin and Diane Ruble suggest that children become ‘gender detectives’, in search of clues as to the implications of belonging to the male or female tribe.11 Nor do they wait for formal instruction. The academic literature is scattered with anecdotal reports of preschoolers’ amusingly flawed scientific accounts of gender difference:
[O]ne child believed that men drank tea and women drank coffee, because that was the way it was in his house. He was thus perplexed when a male visitor requested coffee. Another child, dangling his legs with his father in a very cold lake, announced ‘only boys like cold water, right Dad?’ Such examples suggest that children are actively seeking and ‘chewing’ on information about gender, rather than passively absorbing it from the environment.12
In fact, young children are so eager to carve up the world into what is female and what is male that Martin and Ruble have reported finding it difficult to create stimuli for their studies that children see as gender neutral, ‘because children appear to seize on any element that may implicate a gender norm so that they may categorize it as male or female.’13 For instance, when creating characters from outer space for children, it proved difficult to find colours and shapes that didn’t signify gender. Even something as subtle as the shape of the head could indicate gender in the eyes of the children: aliens with triangular heads, for example, were seen as male.14 (Later, we’ll see why.) And experimental studies bear out children’s propensity to jump to Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus–style conclusions on rather flimsy evidence. Asked to rate the appeal of a gender-neutral toy (which girls and boys on average like the same amount), boys assume that only other boys will like what they themselves like; ditto for girls.15
It’s hardly surprising that children take on the unofficial occupation of gender detective. They are born into a world in which gender is continually emphasised through conventions of dress, appearance, language, colour, segregation and symbols. Everything around the child indicates that whether one is male or female is a matter of great importance. At the same time, as we’ll see in the next chapter, the information we provide to children, through our social structure and media, about what gender means – what goes with being male or female – still follows fairly old-fashioned guidelines.
Forty years ago, psychologists Sandra and Daryl Bem decided to raise their young children Jeremy and Emily in a gender-neutral way. Their goal was to restrict as much as they could their young children’s knowledge of the ‘cultural correlates’ of gender, at least until they were old enough to be critical of stereotypes and sexism.
What, exactly, did this involve?
Theirs was a two-pronged strategy. First, the Bems did all that they could to reduce the normally ubiquitous gender associations in their children’s environment: the information that lets children know what toys, behaviours, skills, personality traits, occupations, hobbies, responsibilities, clothing, hairstyles, accessories, colours, shapes, emotions and so on go with being male and female. This entailed, at its foundation, a meticulously managed commitment to equally shared parenting and household responsibilities. Trucks and dolls, needless to say, were offered with equal enthusiasm to both children; but also pink and blue clothing, and male and female playmates. Care was taken to make sure that the children saw men and women doing cross-gender jobs. By way of censorship, and the judicious use of editing, WhiteOut and marker pens, the Bems also ensured that the children’s bookshelves offered an egalitarian picture-book world:
[M]y husband and I got into the habit of doctoring books whenever possible so as to remove all sex-linked correlations. We did this, among other ways, by changing the sex of the main character; by drawing longer hair and the outline of breasts onto illustrations of previously male truck drivers, physicians, pilots, and the like; and by deleting or altering sections of the text that described females or males in a sex-stereotyped manner. When reading children’s pictures books aloud, we also chose pronouns that avoided the ubiquitous implication that all characters without dresses or pink bows must necessarily be male: ‘And what is this little piggy doing? Why, he or she seems to be building a bridge.’1
The second part of the Bems’ strategy was to, in place of the usual information about what it means to be male or female, promote the idea that the difference between males and females lies in their anatomy and reproductive functions. Your typical preschooler enjoys a detailed knowledge of gender roles, but remains a bit hazy regarding the hard, biological fact that males differ from females when it comes to the allocation of such items as penises, testicles and vaginas.2
Not so, for the Bem children:
[O]ur son Jeremy, then age four, … decided to wear barrettes [hair slides] to nursery school. Several times that day, another little boy told Jeremy that he, Jeremy, must be a girl because ‘only girls wear barrettes.’ After trying to explain to this child that ‘wearing barrettes doesn’t matter’ and that ‘being a boy means having a penis and testicles,’ Jeremy finally pulled down his pants as a way of making his point more convincingly. The other child was not impressed. He simply said, ‘Everybody has a penis; only girls wear barrettes.’
Unlike their peers, Jeremy and Emily were discouraged from using socially determined trappings such as hairstyle, clothing, accessories or profession as a guide to a person’s biological sex. If the children asked whether someone was male or female, their parents ‘frequently denied certain knowledge of the person’s sex, emphasizing that without being able to see whether there was a penis or a vagina under the person’s clothes, [they] had no definitive information.’3
Step forward, please, all those parents who go to similar lengths to protect their children from acquiring prevailing cultural assumptions about gender. And do try to avoid being trampled in the rush.
The Bems’ efforts, I think you’ll agree, seriously outclass what we normally, generously, think of as gender-neutral parenting. They were, in Sandra Bem’s own words, ‘an unconventional family’.4 Some readers will be cheering in admiration, while others roll their eyes with a quiet groan. But whatever your opinion of a parent who teases, ‘What do you mean that you can tell Chris is a girl because Chris has long hair? Does Chris’s hair have a vagina?’5 we can all agree that the intensity and scope of the Bems’ efforts offer a helpful hint as to just how gendered children’s environments are. To this day social structure, media and peers offer no shortage of information to children about masculinity and femininity.
The gendered patterns of our lives can be so familiar that we no longer notice them, as this anecdote reported by legal scholar Deborah Rhode slyly makes plain:
One mother who insisted on supplying her daughter with tools rather than dolls finally gave up when she discovered the child undressing a hammer and singing it to sleep. ‘It must be hormonal,’ was the mother’s explanation. At least until someone asked who had been putting her daughter to bed.6
Yet children, with their fresher observational powers, take note. ‘Russell is a funny Daddy’, commented an astute three-year-old visitor to our home, observing our household’s shared parenting practices. ‘He stays at home like a Mummy.’ Children dropping in to play after school sometimes turn to our son and ask in surprise, ‘Why is your dad home?’ (And more than one child of our acquaintance has disillusioned a boastful father with the information that, to the contrary, Russell is the best Daddy in the world.) Russell, my husband, is indeed ‘funny’ statistically speaking (as well as in other ways that need not concern us here). Whatever you think of the rights, wrongs or reasons for it, it is an empirical fact that children are born into an environment in which it is overwhelmingly women who service the child’s – and family’s – needs. Rare indeed are the children who see their father do more domestic labour than their mother. In fact, as we saw in Chapter 7, there seems to be no work arrangement between mothers and fathers – including his unemployment or her massive salary – that lets women off the domestic hook. Even the rare families who genuinely value each parent’s career and leisure time equally, and fairly split the domestic load may find themselves dismissed as an aberrant (or ‘funny’) data point, as Australian psychologist Barbara David and colleagues have suggested. They note that in a classic study, children were shown a video of men and women playing a game, with the men performing one kind of ritual and the women another. Girls copied the women’s ritual, and boys the men’s, but only after they had confirmed for themselves that this is what women (or men) in general did, and not just one particular woman or man. ‘Thus a parent,’ suggests David, ‘no matter how loving or loved, cannot be a model for appropriate gender behaviour, unless the child’s exposure to the wider world (for example, through friendship groups and the media) suggests that the parent is a representative or prototypical male or female’.7
If so, the egalitarian parent can look forward to being undermined on a daily basis. For, as it happens, neither children, nor children’s media, are renowned for their open-minded approach to gender roles.
Young children, for instance, certainly don’t tend to take the expansive, laissez-faire approach when it comes to gender. Last year, when my son was in kindergarten, he asked a classmate if he could look at her book. ‘No’, the little girl told him. ‘Boys aren’t allowed to look at books about fairies.’ The child well-versed in gender stereotypes is not shy about letting it be known that a peer has crossed the line. When developmental psychologists unobtrusively watch what goes on in preschool classrooms, they find that children receive distinctly cooler responses from peers when they play in gender-inappropriate ways. Developmental psychologist Beverly Fagot found that comments as blunt as ‘you’re silly, that’s for girls’ and ‘that’s dumb, boys don’t play with dolls’ were especially reserved for boys.8 But boys and girls alike are treated to little pointers when other children praise, imitate and join in certain types of play, but criticise, disrupt or abandon other activities. Unsurprisingly, this peer feedback seems to influence children’s behaviour, making it more stereotypical.9 Peers’ responses appear to act as reminders to children that their behaviour doesn’t follow gender rules, because they are particularly effective in bringing cross-gender behaviour to an end. In fact, it seems as though even the prospect of ‘jeer pressure’ may change young children’s behaviour. Preschool children spend more time playing with gender-appropriate toys when an opposite-sex peer is nearby, in comparison with play in the absence of another child.10 Likewise, four- to six-year-old boys express more interest in playing with boyish toys when they are with peers than when they are on their own.11 The sensitivity of presc
hool boys to breaking unwritten gender rules was very much in evidence in a group of preschool children in the UK, who were observed by David Woodward. Younger boys who generally would not play with dolls at preschool (one boy is described furtively dressing and undressing a doll under the table, looking over his shoulder all the while to be sure he wasn’t spotted by other boys) would nonetheless happily play with them at home. And once a rather dominant and socially conservative group of boys left the preschool, the gender rules relaxed; more of the remaining boys started to play with dolls, and in the home corner.12
The media, like peers, also offer lessons in the cultural correlates of gender. Rather than embrace the opportunity to present an imaginary world that offers children a glimpse of possibilities beyond the reality of male and female social roles, children’s media often continue to constrict gender roles, sometimes even with more rigidity than does the real world:
Meet the Jetsons, the family of the future, as imagined by cartoonists in the 1960s. George flies to work in his bubble car while Jane whips up instant meals from a tiny pill using a nuclear energy oven. Even though the Jetsons live in a biomorphic building with a robot for a maid, in terms of gender relations, they might as well be the Flintstones. Dad works and worries about money while mom either stays at home or shops … Although the show’s creators were highly imaginative when it came to the technological gadgets … they could not envision the real change that families underwent.13
Delusions of Gender Page 24