Opinion: Gender Roles and Stereotypes in Early Education

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The assignment of traditional gender roles at an early age to children may be affecting their freedom of choice when they are considering their academic interests or professional future.

Gender roles are one of the first concepts we learn in the earliest phases of socialization. We see this process as inherent in integrating children into society, but how we introduce them to gender roles significantly influences not only the relationships of coexistence between boys and girls but also their vision of what jobs are suitable for men and women.

Recent studies demonstrate that boys and girls between the ages of four and nine already have a differentiated perception of the professional attributes that are attributed to men and women. The results of the paper “Socialization of Gender Stereotypes Related to Attributes and Professions Among Young Spanish School-Aged Children,” confirmed that the boys and girls who participated in the study had internalized the functions of gender, applying them distinctly when they had to assign personal attributes or professional roles.

As an example, during the study, it could be seen that the boys associated strength and intelligence with males, while women were associated more with kindness and caregiving vocations. These stereotypes also impact the children’s views of who usually have the highest job positions or receive higher wages. The children who participated more easily associated men with jobs that involved greater leadership and more valued responsibilities and, therefore, better jobs and salaries. Meanwhile, the children assigned women to work positions more related to support services that were not valued as highly in the scheme of power or agency, nor in salaries.

The study found a direct relationship between the biases of gender socialization and the severe effects these have on the job choices available to girls in the future, as well as their economic future and other opportunities. How can one begin to combat this bias when talking about gender roles? The discussion does not call specifically to redefine what we mean by feminine or masculine basically but to reevaluate this and consider being more flexible with the lines we draw between the two spectra.

The arbitrariness of gender values

The first step involves understanding that sex is a biological issue, and gender is a social construct. Like any social construct, this implies arbitrary values that can be easily manipulated, altered, or exchanged. For example, something as simple as the colors pink and blue, which today we associate with feminine and masculine attributes, respectively, were entirely applied in reverse until the early twentieth century. Traditionally, blue was associated with delicacy, kindness, and temperance, characteristics that nowadays we consider within the female spectrum. At the same time, pink was perceived as a diluted version of red, which projected power, dominance, and proactivity attributes that we associate with masculinity.

According to Gavin Evans, professor at Birkbeck University and expert in the history of color, the change that led us to see pink as an exclusively feminine color did not happen until the decade of the 50s in which a cosmetics advertising campaign used pink as the primary color in its graphics. The campaign was so successful that we could no longer think about pink without immediately associating it with all that we understand as feminine.

However, these values can be easily changed. A study conducted in China in 2018 in which 120 children participated, discovered that any color could be considered feminine or masculine, depending on the instructions given to the minors.

The study found that the male children tended to choose green toys if they were told that green was a masculine color, and the girls used yellow toys if it was explained to them that yellow was a female color. The colors and objects that we associate with feminine and masculine are entirely arbitrary; they can change over time, or be manipulated, but what has remained stable is the perception of the feminine as supportive and secondary to the masculine. It is essential to deal with this notion beginning in early education.

A balanced valuation of gender

There are basic recommendations that can be applied in the schools to reduce the severe social gap between the genders and the overvaluation of masculine attributes over the feminine ones. Some of the actions that can be taken include the abolition of educational spaces exclusively assigned to boys or girls, such as segregated contexts that mark different activities that are restricted to each gender. Others are the elimination of messages that defend hierarchical differences between men and women and an integrated educational intention to analyze critically any sexist social messages and customs, especially those that are implicit and are assumed to be a fundamental part of culture and socialization.

Educational spaces and activities must give boys and girls the same learning and development opportunities. To achieve this, it is not necessary to destroy what we understand by gender but to make the required adjustments so that the roles that derive from gender are balanced and that one does not have more social value than the other.

Disclaimer: This is an Op-ed article. The viewpoints expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect the opinions, viewpoints and official policies of Tecnológico de Monterrey.

Translation by Daniel Wetta.