Integration (Last Part)

Styles and Symbols

• Gendered styles and symbols range from body image and hairstyles to
speech patterns and communication.
• Preschoolers have clear stereotypes about colors and associate physical
cues such as “colors and clothing” with gender-typed interests in others.
Via observation
• Metaphorical associations, children attribute to boys things that are
angular, rough, and dangerous (e.g., a bear), and to girls things that are
soft, light, and graceful (e.g., a butterfly).
• Children select toys using metaphorical cues rather than known
stereotypes when these are in conflict (e.g., a pink truck may be
appealing to girls).
Hairstyles and clothing (and adornment in general) are important
external stylistic markers strongly associated with gender and are
learned at a very young age.
• 100% of first grade children knew the norms for girls’ and boys’
clothing and hairstyles, and by third grade for play styles.
• Appearance cues appear to be more important for girls than boys.
SPEECH: When children ages 4 to 7 were asked to enact their father’s
speech, they used a deeper-pitched voice and loud voice; when
enacting their mother’s speech, they tended to use higher-pitched
voice, exaggerated intonation, and female-stereotyped vocabulary
Identity and Self Perception
• Dress and mannerism provide ways to actively construct gender.
• Body Image: Images of one’s body play a significant role in predicting
depression, eating disorders, and low self-esteem, especially in
adolescent girls.
• Children begin to develop body image stereotypes about others
concerning weight around age 5. It appears that children also develop a
preference for muscular male bodies at a young age.
• Between 6 and 8 years of age, sex differences appear, with girls showing
more body dissatisfaction than boys, and more desire to be thin, which
are consistent over time and related to disordered eating behavior and
eating attitudes.
• Body dissatisfaction is linked with emotional distress, appearance
rumination, and unnecessary cosmetic surgery, as well as depression
and disordered eating.
• A number of studies link body image to media and societal pressures
(Peer pressure) for attractiveness and thinness for females.
• Changes in boys’ body dissatisfaction over adolescence is related to
internalization of the male muscular ideal; girls’ body dissatisfaction
related to their body mass, social comparisons, and appearance
conversations with friends.
• Body dissatisfaction is associated in girls with earlier pubertal
maturation and, in both sexes, with maternal pressure to lose weight.
• Preferences: Young children express strong preferences to dress in a
way that indicates their sex, regardless of parents’ preferences, with
girls preferring frilly dresses and bows and boys, baseball caps and
sneakers. But, few studies have addressed verbal preferences.
• They also associated play activities with clothing styles.
• Young adults often show stereotypic color preferences: Females
prefer pinks but not darker reds, and males prefer shades of blues.
• Some people, especially females, have genes that provide additional
color discrimination, and this may contribute to sex differences in
color preferences.
Behavioral Enactment:
• Both verbal and non-verbal forms of expression may communicate
information about gender, either intentionally or unintentionally.
• Use of language and non-verbal communication styles has been of
interest to researchers because these differences may reflect
differences in power and status; they may also vary depending on
context.
Communication Styles.
Girls use strategies to demonstrate their attentiveness, responsiveness,
and support, whereas boys use strategies to demand attention and
establish dominance. Girls tend to use affiliative and help-seeking
speech acts; boys tend to use controlling and bossy exchanges.
• Girls differed from boys by being more talkative, using more affiliative
speech ( language used to establish or maintain contacts with others)
and less self-assertive speech.
• Assertive speech were evident in same-sex interactions but not in
mixed-sex interactions.
• Sex differences in affiliative speech were larger in unstructured
situations than in structured situations (context effect).
• Culture also influence communication styles.
Nonverbal Communication.
Girls more likely to use limp wrists, arm flutters, and flexed elbows when
walking, boys to put hands-on hips more than girls, and gender non-
normative boys to exhibit feminine mannerisms.
• Among adults gender-related physical characteristics and mannerisms
(e.g., deep voice and broad shoulders) have been found to relate to
personality traits, interests, roles, and gender identity in men but not
women, suggesting some coherence in the various domains of gender
for men.
Clothing and Appearance.
Clothing, jewelry, cosmetics, and hairstyles provide a wealth of
information about a person’s sex, socioeconomic background, status,
lifestyle, nationality, and age. Parents use clothing to mark the sex of
their children for strangers, and these cues are accurately interpreted
much of the time.
In adults, women actively construct their identity through the
“gendering” of their clothing.
• Girls who dress in feminine styles may be reluctant to engage in active
or dirty activities because of their clothing, and/or they may rigidly
adhere to gender norms.
• Moreover, a cycle may develop in which girls’ clothing choices modify
their behavior, decreasing their competence for certain activities over
time, leading to even less interest in those activities.
• Any factor that modifies children’s interests may have a large impact
on later abilities and behavior.
Values regarding Gender
• In many cultures, more positive evaluations are applied to men and masculine
activities than to women and feminine activities.
• The social psychological literature has distinguished between personal evaluations
(i.e., private regard) about a social group (in this case, male versus female) and
perceptions of others’ evaluations (i.e., public regard). Men are highly regarded by
others.
• At a very young age, children are attentive to sex differences in power.
• Children older than 10 years perceive that females are devalued.
• Discrimination was perceived, however, only when children were explicitly told
that it was a possible reason why a teacher might respond more favorably to a boy
than to a girl (or viceversa).
• Girls but not boys were more likely to perceive such discrimination against girls
than against boys.
Identity or Self-Perception: As children begin to recognize that males and
females are differentially valued, their own self-perceptions may be
affected when their identity as a group member is salient.
• According to social identity theory, the social categories into which
individuals are divided have evaluative implications and thus
consequences for self-esteem.
• Girls evaluate themselves more negatively than boys in many situations.
• 5- to 8-year-old children learn about positive and negative traits
associated with the sexes, they gradually begin to view themselves in
terms of such traits.
• There is a positive relation with self-esteem and other indices of
adjustment among third to eighth grade children.
• Preferences: Three types of gender-related values is examined:
(1) in-group biases i.e favouritism
(2) prejudice against females, and
(3) attitudes about egalitarian gender roles.
In-Group/Out-Group Biases. According to cognitive theories, children’s
growing awareness of their membership in one sex category is likely to
create a number of identity validation processes, one of which is to view
one’s own sex, the “in-group,” more favorably than the other.
• By age 5, both girls and boys were markedly more positive about their
own sex than about the other sex, and even 3-year-old girls (but not
boys) showed significant in-group favoritism.
• This positivity bias declines with age, at least after age 4 to 5 years and
the decline is often stronger for girls.
Prejudice against Women. One reason for the high level of interest in gender
development is a search for the origins of women’s disadvantaged status in most
cultures.
• Although both boys and girls felt more positively about their own sex, boys were
described in more negative terms overall.
• Similarly, children’s interpretations of ambiguous behavior were more negative for
male than female targets.
• As children begin to stereotypically associate positive attributes more with females
than with males ( “girls are sugar and spice and everything nice”), they may initially
value females more.
• Indeed, this positive evaluation of females continues to some extent into adulthood.
• However, for adults, cultural standards emphasize masculine attributes of prestige,
power, and competence.
• Prejudice toward women may be characterized as indecisive: Women are often
portrayed as nice but incompetent (more competent-high ranked, difficult or novel
job).
• Egalitarian gender-role attitudes can be seen as a more advanced
stage of liberal gender attitudes, because they endorse and value
men's and women's equal and shared breadwinning and nurturing
family roles. Today, the social construction of gender roles has
gradually become more flexible.
• Behavioral Enactment, Adoption: Values are expressed in behavior
through overt indices of preferential or discriminatory treatment.
• A common paradigm for examining discriminatory behavior is a
reward allocation task in which individuals are asked to distribute
resources to different groups or individuals based on performance
and personal attributes.
• Some research has shown in-group favoritism based on ethnicity or
gender.
• Girls tended to give rewards on the basis of in-group favoritism,
whereas boys tended to reward on the basis of equity.
• At age 3, both boys and girls gave nicer prizes to girls regardless of
actual performance, and the clearest indication of in-group favoritism
for both sexes occurred at age 5.
• Children, especially boys, who deviate from gender norms suffer more
from peer ridicule and peer rejection.
• Boys who violated norms for masculinity were teased, shunned, or
referred to as “girls.”