Young children must be protected from ingrained gender stereotypes

[niyad]

Young children must be protected from ingrained gender stereotypes


Whether in school or in the toy shop, sexist assumptions about boys and girls can have a long-lasting effect on children. Luckily, some kids are on top of it


Gender stereotyping … is it for life? Photograph: Kidstock/Getty Images/Blend Images


Scrolling through my Twitter timeline this week, one particular tweet, with an image attached, immediately jumped out at me. A parent had shared a snapshot of her six-year-old child’s homework – a worksheet asking pupils to research a scientist or inventor. So far, so normal. But the question, in jaunty Comic Sans, read: “Who was he? Who was the person you have chosen to look at? How old were they when they began inventing? Did they have a wife and family?”

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To those who cry “overreaction”, a new study published this month by the US-based National Bureau of Economic Research suggests that gender bias at primary school may in fact have long-term implications for pupils. The study saw several groups of students take two exams, one marked blind by outside examiners, the other marked by teachers who knew the students’ names. In maths, girls outperformed boys on the anonymously marked exam, but boys outperformed girls when assessed by teachers who knew their names, suggesting that they may have overestimated the boys’ abilities and underestimated the girls.


Tracking the pupils to the end of high school, the researchers found that boys who were given encouragement as youngsters not only performed better later on, but were also more likely to take advanced courses involving maths, compared with girls who had been discouraged. They concluded: “Teachers’ over-assessment of boys in a specific subject has a positive and significant effect on boys’ overall future achievements in that subject, while having a significant negative effect on girls.”




Of course, many teachers actively encourage girls into Stem (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) subjects. But gender stereotypes are not only passed on at school. They also proliferate in the advertising, television, books, magazines and conversations that children are exposed to from a young age. One parent recently recounted to me the moment that their three-year-old daughter picked up a toy stethoscope, only for another well-meaning adult to swoop in and comment: “Ah, are you going to be a nurse?” Not, of course, that it wouldn’t be a fine choice of profession, but what would the corresponding comment have been had a little boy chanced upon the same toy?

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http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/womens-blog/2015/feb/23/sexist-assumptions-young-children-gender-stereotypes