This course taster is taken from the Open University’s ‘Child Development’ course (ED209). It is an extract from one of the four course text books (Banerjee, R. (2005) ‘Gender identity and the development of gender roles’, in Ding, S. and Littleton, K. S. (eds) Children’s Personal and Social Development, Oxford, Blackwell.) © Open University 2005

Most contemporary theorists argue that cognitive processes need to be taken into account in order to explain how the social environment makes its mark on the child’s gender development and how the child plays an important role in directing his or her own gender development.

Cognitive processes

The theories covered in this section all relate to aspects of children’s thinking that are central to their gender development. They focus on the ways in which children attend to and then process and organise this information, and have in common a justifiable emphasis on the active role of children in shaping their own development; they are not simply passive respondents to stereotyped information that is imposed upon them. This notion of the child as active helps psychologists understand why consistent effects of social environment are so difficult to find – the effects themselves are, in one way or another, dependent on the child.

Social cognitive theory

Early social learning theories, where the main focus was on the simple, one-way effect of environment on behaviour, were criticised because they provided too simplistic a picture of human development. Bandura’s social cognitive theory (SCT) builds on the earlier social learning approaches by addressing the fact that human development involves a complex interplay of many factors. SCT is usually presented (e.g. Bandura, 1986) in terms of a ‘model of causation’ that links three sets of variables, all of which influence each other: behaviour (e.g. activity patterns), person (e.g. expectations, intentions, goals), and environment (e.g. modelling, reinforcement). The emphasis is still very much on how children’s social experiences influence their behaviour, but SCT highlights the active role of children in their observational learning. They can attend selectively to particular events or people in the environment, then mentally organise, combine, and rehearse the observed behaviours, decide when to enact the behaviour, and finally monitor the outcomes of that behaviour.

What are the implications of SCT for an understanding of gender development? Just as in early social learning approaches, Bussey and Bandura (1999) point to evidence of negative parental and peer responses to children’s behaviour that runs counter to gender stereotypes as confirmation of the idea that gender development is heavily based on external sanctions early on. Children’s socialisation history, it is argued, provides distinctive information about masculinity and femininity from birth – for example, clothes, nursery décor, and the toys and activities provided. Moreover, there is undoubtedly widespread modelling of gender stereotypes in the family as well as in wider culture. When children’s gender role-inconsistent behaviour is met with open ridicule by adults and peers there is a clear motivation for the child to behave in a gender-stereotyped manner.

However, there is also evidence of choice and flexibility in children’s behaviour, and this is where cognitive processes come into play. Once children have begun to internalise the standards of behaviour appropriate for males and females, based on the social experiences described above, their own behaviour is no longer dependent on external rewards or punishments. Rather, they become capable of directing their own behaviour in such a way as to satisfy their internalised standards. Furthermore, they monitor their behaviour against those standards, so that they can feel pride on performing gender role-consistent behaviour, even if there is no explicit external praise.In a study which supported this view of gender development (Bussey and Bandura, 1992), nursery children aged three to four years of age were asked to evaluate gender-typed behaviour by peers (as presented on videotape) and to rate how they would feel about themselves if they were playing with masculine and feminine toys.

Even the younger children disapproved of gender role-inconsistent behaviour by peers (e.g. boys playing with dolls), but when they rated their own feelings they were the same for both masculine and feminine toys. In contrast, the four-year-olds not only disapproved of others’ role-inconsistent behaviours, but were also self-critical when judging how they would feel if they were playing with role-inconsistent toys. Furthermore, these self-evaluations predicted how the children actually went on to play with masculine and feminine toys. This was taken as evidence that while social sanctions for gender-typed behaviour are clearly present in the younger children, self-regulation becomes more important with age.

Cognitive-developmental theory

Despite the focus on cognition and internal self-regulation in Bandura’s more recent work, many theorists argue that there are more fundamental cognitive processes that need to be taken into account when analysing children’s gender development. In particular, researchers have suggested that children’s concepts of themselves as male or female play a critical role in encouraging children to identify and endorse gender roles. This notion was first set out at the same time as the early social learning approaches to gender development. The book that contained Mischel’s (1966) account of the social learning approach to gender development also included Lawrence Kohlberg’s (1966) equally significant report on his cognitive-developmental theory. While recognising the importance of observational learning, Kohlberg presented a very different account of how children come to understand and enact gender roles: in his own words, his theory “assumes that basic sexual attitudes are not patterned directly by either biological instincts or arbitrary cultural norms, but by the child’s cognitive organization of his social world along sex-role dimensions” (p. 82).

In Kohlberg’s view, boys think “I am a boy, therefore I want to do boy things, therefore the opportunity to do boy things (and to gain approval for doing them) is rewarding” (p. 89). His emphasis, then, is on gender role development as being self-socialised; certainly, there is plenty of information about gender roles in the social environment, but it is the child who actively seeks out, organises, and then behaves in accordance with that information. This contrasts markedly with the view of the child as behaving in a gender-typed way simply because he or she is rewarded – or sees someone else being rewarded – for it.

A major implication of this perspective is that children’s appreciation of – and adherence to – gender roles is dependent on their gender identity, their sense of being male or female. Kohlberg, and other proponents of this approach, argued that children develop a sense of gender identity in a sequence of distinct stages, an idea that owes a great deal to Jean Piaget’s influential work on cognitive development. Piaget had argued that children’s logical thought could be seen to develop through a sequence of discrete stages, each qualitatively different from the others. Kohlberg connected this development with growth in children’s sense of gender identity. The Kohlbergian sequence of gender identity development involves three stages.

Kohlberg’s stages of gender development

Stage 1: Gender labelling
Children can identify themselves and other people as girls or boys (mummies or daddies). However, gender is not seen as stable over time or across changes in superficial physical characteristics (e.g. length of hair, clothes).

Stage 2: Gender stability
Children recognise that gender is stable over time: boys will grow up to be daddies, and girls will grow up to be mummies. However, the unchanging nature of gender – that it remains the same regardless of changes in superficial appearance or activity choice – is not yet appreciated.

Stage 3: Gender consistency
Children have a full appreciation of the permanence of gender over time and across situations.

By the age of around three years, in the gender labelling stage, children become able to label themselves and others as boys or girls accurately. It is not for another couple of years, however, that children are thought to enter the gender stability stage and appreciate that this classification would remain stable over time (i.e. a boy would grow up to be a daddy, and a girl would grow up to be a mummy). But only in the final gender consistency stage, at around the age of 6 or 7 years, were children judged to have an insight into the constancy of sex regardless of the passage of time, changes in context, or transformations in physical features.

This understanding was thought to develop in parallel with classic Piagetian changes in children’s appreciation of conservation (e.g. understanding that the volume of water in a beaker would remain the same after the water is poured into a beaker of different dimensions). Most importantly, Kohlberg argued that the “child’s gender identity can provide a stable organizer of the child’s psychosexual attitudes only when he is categorically certain of its unchangeability” (1966, p. 95). Thus, the mature understanding of gender constancy was considered critically important for the gender-typing process.

The research literature provides some support for the notion that more advanced gender concepts are associated with selective attention to same-sex models. The classic study of Slaby and Frey (1975) assessed children’s understanding of gender as a fixed, unchanging attribute using a structured Gender Concept Interview. Children’s responses to the questions seemed to support Kohlberg’s sequence of gender identity development. Furthermore, the children who demonstrated an appreciation of the stability of gender were more likely than children with a less mature gender concept to attend to the same-sex model on a videotape that depicted both male and female models (see Research Summary below).

On the whole, however, the research evidence for a link between the appreciation of gender constancy and gender-typing is not strong (see reviews by Huston, 1983; Ruble and Martin, 1998). In fact, most of the evidence suggests that it is the most immature form of the gender concept – the accurate labelling of oneself as a boy or girl – that is often associated with gender-typed conduct and stereotyped beliefs. Bussey and Bandura (1999) note that “long before children have attained gender constancy, they prefer to play with toys traditionally associated with their gender, […] to model their behavior after same-sex models, […] and to reward peers for gender-appropriate behavior’ (p. 678).

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