Delusions of Gender (35 page)

Media also distinguish between males and females in a more subtle way: importance. ‘Children scanning the list of titles of what have been designated as the very best children’s books are bound to receive the impression that girls are not very important because no one has bothered to write books about them. The content of the books rarely dispels this impression’, remarked Lenore Weitzman and colleagues in their classic review of Caldecott winners,
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nearly a third of which had no female characters at all. And of course there are characters, and then there are
main
characters. The Dr. Seuss books are rightly classics, adored by children and a joy of rediscovery for parents. Yet as Lamb and Brown observe, in all the forty-two books he wrote, not one has a female lead in its central story.
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The power of the media to dish up a stripped-down, concentrated version of cultural values enables it to represent the higher status of males in this uncomfortably blunt fashion. Even in contemporary picture books, researchers find that this is a habit that dies hard, with writers and illustrators still less inclined to feature female characters. For example, the most recent analysis of the Caldecott winners and runners-up, together with 155 best-selling children’s books around the same time, found that males, overall, were featured nearly twice
as often as females in title roles, and they appeared in about 50 percent more pictures.
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Nor does the use of gender-ambiguous animals or characters in books help to increase female numbers. This is because mothers almost always label gender-neutral characters in picture books as male.
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If it doesn’t look like a female, it’s male. I’ve tried labelling neutral animals and characters as female when reading to my children – it feels extremely unnatural, as you will discover if you try for yourself. (The reason is probably that we have a tendency to think of people or creatures as male unless otherwise indicated. In other words, as has been long observed, men are people, but women are women.) As within the pages of books, females tend to be underrepresented on TV and computer screens, and to miss out on central roles in advertisements and even cereal boxes.
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A recent survey of 19,664 children’s programmes in twenty-four countries found that only 32 percent of main characters are female.
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(This drops to an even more dismal 13 percent when it comes to nonhuman creatures like animals, monsters and robots.) And, a survey of the 101 top-grossing G-rated movies from 1990 to 2005 found that less than a third of the speaking roles go to females, with no signs of improvement over time.
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As the Web site of the Geena Davis Institute, which sponsored the research, asks, ‘What message does this send to young children?’
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With fervent and tireless testing of hypotheses taking place – and with such a wealth of data to work with – it’s hardly surprising that by the time they are four years old children are already remarkably advanced gender theorists. (One can even, at a stretch, imagine a panel of preschoolers coming up with, or perhaps even improving upon, certain popular book titles such as:
Men Are Like Waffles, Women Are Like Spaghetti
;
Why Men Don’t Iron
; and
Why Men Don’t Have a Clue and Women Always Need More Shoes
.) To the preschooler, information about which gender goes with hammers and fire hats, and brooms and baby bottles, was covered way
back in Gender Stereotyping 101.
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They know it all. But what is perhaps most amazing is that, without even troubling to read the latest best-selling exposition of biological essentialism, they are using this database of cultural correlates to draw out some general, abstract principles. Social psychologists Laurie Rudman and Peter Glick pithily characterise the content of gender stereotypes as ‘bad but bold’ (with males being tough, competitive and assertive) versus ‘wonderful but weak’ (with females stereotyped as being gentle, kind and soft).
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And preschoolers, it seems, are already working this out for themselves. ‘Few men keep bears’, as developmental psychologist Beverly Fagot and colleagues pointed out. And yet four-year-olds reliably classify a fierce looking bear as for boys. They can even classify different shapes, textures and emotions (like angular, rough and anger) as male and female.
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This is why the triangle-headed creatures from outer space mentioned earlier were categorised as male – all those angles. Indeed, so powerful are these metaphorical gender cues that five-year-old children will confidently declare that a spiky brown tea set and an angry-looking baby doll dressed in rough black clothing are for boys, while a smiling yellow truck adorned with hearts and a yellow hammer strewn with ribbons are for girls.
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This is truly remarkable, when you think about it. Heaven knows, I’ve heard enough parents openly labelling certain sports, toys, activities, behaviours and personality traits as being for boys or for girls. In one month alone, I heard people referring to colouring in a dinosaur, playing soccer, being noisy and wanting to press elevator buttons as boy things. But you don’t often hear a parent exclaiming, ‘No,
no
, Jane! Angles are for boys, not girls. Take the curved one.’ Yet even before they reach school, children can go well beyond the surface of gender associations and make inferences about nothing less than male and female inner nature itself. They also seem to learn, uncomfortably young, that females are ‘other’. When Barbara David asked four- and five-year-old children to choose items that would show a martian what human beings were
like, the girls chose a mix of female and male objects (such as guns and dolls), whereas the boys chose almost only male items.
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All of this was what the Bems were trying to avoid. As we imagine them bent over their children’s picture books, carefully whiting out beards and drawing in breasts, we can see why, without a doubt, they would not be terribly impressed by the despairing tales of parents who simply offer their children a few nontraditional toys.

A
few years ago, when the Australian feminist writer Monica Dux wrote an opinion piece criticising parents’ tolerance for the pink princess phenomenon, one angry respondent presented her own disapproval as evidence that her daughter’s passion for pink was a manifestation of her true self that it would be somehow wrong to deny:

On giving birth to a daughter, I swore that she wouldn’t be smothered in frilly pink clothes, and that she would play with cars and with stuffed animals. As it turns out, my child is a person in her own right. She loves all things pink and frilly.… I worry … that if I deny her this pleasure, then it is just the beginning of a long road where I tell her that she is not allowed to be herself but rather that she must become what I want her to be.
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Fine for millions of marketing dollars to be spent promoting a pink, frilly world to girls. Parents, however, should keep their opinions to themselves lest they unduly influence children’s preferences! But also, because gendered preferences often appear to develop despite their best efforts, parents often assume that they must come from within the child: the biology-as-fallback position described by Emily Kane. Yet as New York University developmental psychologist Diane Ruble points out, ‘[i]t requires little detective work for children to notice some of the
most blatant physical characteristics associated with females: pink, frilly, and dresses.’
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She, Cindy Miller, and colleagues asked preschoolers the open-ended question, ‘Tell me what you know about girls. Describe them.’ This way, they could see what it was about girls that came most quickly and easily to children’s minds. The most frequent answer related to appearance: girls have long hair, girls are pretty, girls wear dresses – that kind of thing.
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(Feminine Beauty Ideal: 1. Old-fashioned feminism: 0.) By contrast, the preschoolers’ descriptions of boys centred more on the sorts of activities that boys do and their rough, active, personality traits.

How does this kind of knowledge, amassed from an early age, influence children? As we’ve seen, children 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. Meanwhile, at about two years of age, children discover on which side of the divide they are located. It remains to be seen, in my view, whether subtle gender differences in babies’ toy preferences before they know their own sex can be explained by socialisation by parents, unwitting or otherwise. But once children know their own sex, in theory they can start to take socialisation into their own hands.

And it’s plausible to think that they will. Gaining membership to a group, any group, normally brings a money-back guarantee of favouritism. In the infamous minimal group studies conducted by Henri Tajfel and colleagues, adults are randomly assigned to completely trivial groups. For example, they are asked to estimate the number of dots in an array, and then categorised as either a dot overestimator or a dot underestimator. It’s hard to imagine a categorisation of less psychological significance. And yet membership of even such arbitrarily assigned and short-lived social categories can engender a warm glow towards fellow dot overestimators (or underestimators) that does not extend so far as those who take a different approach to dot guesstimating.
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Children, it turns out, are also susceptible to an in-group bias to prefer what belongs to their group. Recent work by Rebecca Bigler and colleagues has shown that this is especially the case when groups are made visually distinct, and authority figures use and label the groups. In one study, three- to five-year-old preschoolers in two child-care classrooms were randomly assigned to the Blue group or the Red group. Over a three-week period all the children wore a red or blue T-shirt every day (according to the group to which they’d been assigned). In one classroom, the teachers left it at that. The colour groups were not mentioned again. But in the other classroom, the teachers made constant use of the two categories. Children’s cubbies were decorated with blue and red labels, at the door they were told to line up with Blues on this side and Reds on that side, and they were regularly referred to by group label (‘Good morning, Blues and Reds’). At the end of the three weeks, the experimenters canvassed each child’s opinion on a number of matters. They found that being categorised as a Red or a Blue for just three weeks was enough to bias children’s views. The children, for example, preferred toys they were told were liked by their own group and expressed a greater desire to play with other Red (or Blue) children. While some forms of favouritism were common to all the children, more was seen in kids from the classroom in which teachers had made a bigger deal out of the Red versus Blue dichotomy.
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Just imagine how powerfully exactly the same psychological mechanisms can drive in-group pride and out-group prejudice when it comes to gender. In the young child’s world, gender is the social category that stands out above all others, right from the start. Conventions of clothing and accessories mean that gender is extremely obvious visually, and boys and girls may be regularly labelled and organised (‘Now it’s the boys’ turn to wash their hands’) by gender, especially in early education settings.
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And, unlike adults and older children, younger children don’t tend to have other social categories like
jock, doctor, Christian
or
artist
with which to identify.
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The drive for group belonging may explain
why young children insist on girlish or boyish behaviour or dress even in the face of parental displeasure, suggest Diane Ruble and colleagues.
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So for the self-socialising preschool girl, a puff of pink frills lends solidity to an important group identity based on gender. Every semester, my youngest son’s kindergarten has a dress-up day. One little girl in a cat costume walked into the room to discover that every other girl, without exception, was dressed up as either a princess or a fairy. She burst into tears and wailed to her mother, ‘I should have worn my princess dress!’ On the next dress-up day, she did.

Likewise, we can expect boys to be drawn to toys or activities that fit with their sophisticated, metaphorical understanding that ‘tough’ is for boys:

In one study, researchers transformed a pastel ‘My Little Pony’ by shaving the mane (a soft ‘girlish’ feature), painting it black (a ‘tough’ colour), and adding spiky teeth (for an aggressive demeanour). Both boys and girls classified the altered pony as a boy’s toy, and most of the boys (but not the girls) were extremely interested in obtaining one.
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The five-year-old girls in this study, by the way, ‘were enchanted by … the lavender-satin-covered guns and holster, and the pink-furred war helmet’.
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