The effects of gendered information in stories on preschool children’s development of gender stereotypes

Abstract

Social-cognitive theory posits that children learn gender stereotypes through gendered information. The present study examined whether children learn new gender stereotypes from stories when unknown words are linked to a gendered protagonist or context information. In Experiment 1, 40 3-to 6-year-old preschoolers were read stories with either a gendered protagonist embedded within a non-gendered context, or a nongendered protagonist embedded within a gendered context. In Experiment 2, the same sample of children were read stories with the protagonist and the context displaying congruent or incongruent gender information. Each story featured an unknown activity linked with the stereotypical content. Both experiments indicate that the children rated the activity according to both the gender of the context and of the protagonist; however, the effect of the latter was stronger. In addition, children showed higher interest in the unknown activity if the protagonist's gender matched their own sex. Thus, gender information in stories influences how children perceive unknown words. Statement of contributionWhat is already known on this subject?Stories convey gender labels and tell what is acceptable for the male or female gender. Gender labels influence children in the way they perceive colours, professions, and toys. Stories can activate or facilitate previous gender knowledge. What does this study add?The study shows that children use gender information in stories to label unknown words. There is a differential effect between the protagonist's gender versus general stereotypic content. Gender information differs qualitatively in how children's gender development is influenced. BackgroundGender stereotypes, which represent normative 'assumptions about traits and behaviors that people in the labeled [gender] categories are thought to possess' (Kite, Deaux, & This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License, which permits use and distribution in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, the use is non-commercial and no modifications or adaptations are made.

Sixty years of gender representation in children’s books: Conditions associated with overrepresentation of male versus female protagonists

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Judging a book by its older adult cover: age-related expectations and parental preference for children’s books

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Sixty Years of Gender Representation in Children’s Books: Conditions Associated with Overrepresentation of Male versus Female Protagonists

“…Following the convention established in previous work (e.g., McCabe et al, 2011), we restricted the present analyses to only those books with a single identifiable protagonist. We chose to maintain this approach because the impact of a single gender is more straightforwardly interpreted than the genders of multiple characters, and recent work suggests that the central character's gender strongly influences young children's learning of gender stereotypes (Seitz et al, 2020).…”