Integration of

perspectives:
Gender Typing
 Gender Typing
Expectations about people’s behavior that are based on their biological
sex,
or the process through which individuals acquire and internalize such
expectations.
Biological/Categorical Sex (1)
A key issue concerns how and when do children learn about their
placement in a gender group.
• Concepts or Beliefs:
1. Making Gender Distinctions:
Infants as young as 3 to 4 months of age are capable of distinguishing
between males and females in a categorical manner.
9- to 11- month-olds can discriminate faces by sex, habituate to faces
of both sexes, and make intermodal associations (e.g., among female
faces and voices).
• When can children label the sexes?
Most 24- and 28-month-old children chose the correct picture in
response to experimenter-provided gender labels (Campbell, Shirley, &
Caygill, 2002).
Findings suggest a need to revise prior conclusions that children do not
understand gender labels until 21⁄2 years, because they do.
• What cues are used to discriminate or label the sexes?
• Perceptual discriminations made before 6 months of age may be based
on facial features alone, without hair styles/length or clothing cues.
• 3-year-olds can identify a neutral figure as a man or a woman using
clothes and voice, with hair a better cue for identifying the figure as a
woman than a man and face and body type better for identifying the
figure as a man
 In short, perceptually discriminating males from females (in
habituation and visual preference studies) is based on minimal
cues and occurs in infancy, but verbal identification of male or
female shows a more complex developmental course.
2. Gender Constancy:
Children’s developing sense of the permanence of
categorical sex (“I am a girl and will always be a girl”) is
a critical organizer and motivator for learning gender
concepts and behaviors.
1. Identify their own and other’s sex (3 years).
2. Gender remains stable over time (3-5 years).
3. Gender is fixed and immutable characteristic.
From a cognitive developmental perspective, children would not be
expected to show a complete understanding of constancy until they
mastered conservation, usually during the concrete operational period
(5 to 7 years of age (Maccoby, 1990).
• High constancy scores by 3- to 5- year-olds are eliminated when
justifications are included (Taylor et al., 2006). This is because
young children generally do not provide a constancy-relevant
justification for their responses (e.g., “It doesn’t matter if he’s
wearing a dress, he’ll always be a boy”), but rather focus on
irrelevant details (e.g., “He still has a boy’s face”).
• Thus, young children may focus more on gender categories than
on role conflicts, and thus their response is simple.
• Dip in consistency scores occurs at approximately the same time that
there is an increase in children’s use of social norms to explain their
answers (e.g., “If Jack wore lipstick, Jack would be a girl; boys can’t
wear lipstick”; Szkrybalo & Ruble, 1999).
• Finally, the recovery of constancy after age 5 years may represent an
integration of understanding categorical distinctions with
understanding gender role norms.
• This issue remains important because of its implications
for predicted associations between constancy and
outcomes such as learning gender stereotypes or
developing gender-typed preferences.
• Care must be taken because the “errors” of older
children may not reflect a lack of understanding and
because high level responding among 3- to 4-year-olds
may not reflect a true understanding of constancy.
Beliefs about the Origins of Gender Group Differences.
• Do children believe that the sexes differ because of biological factors, or
do they believe differences are more likely due to societal factors, such as
how children are raised? This issue is important, in part, because it may
provide insight about when and why children show changes in flexibility
in their gender-related perceptions and behaviors at different ages.
• Several studies indicate that adults believe sex differences are based
more on socialization than biological factors.
• In children and adolescents, attributions of differences to biological
factors seem to decrease with age. When preschoolers were asked about
the outcome of a child being raised by members of only one sex, they
attributed characteristics to the target children based on their sex rather
than on the basis of the rearing environment.
Identity or Self-Perception
• Gender identity is a person’s sense of self as a male or female.
• Feelings about a person’s biological sex and behavioral self-
presentation as male or female.
• Research on gender identity has generally followed two separate
paths:
(1) the typical development of self-awareness as male or female
(2) variations in gender identity.
Typical Developmental Course
• Most children can accurately label their sex and place a picture of
themselves with other same-sex children by 27 to 30 months, but
recent research suggests that attaining basic gender identity occurs
earlier for many children. A child’s awareness of being a boy or a girl is
considered by cognitive theorists to motivate gender-typed behavior.
• Systematic evidence shows that gender identity is not determined
simply by either biology or rearing, and that gender identity may
change even in adulthood.
Gender Identity Disorder of
Childhood (GIDC)
• GIDC is for children who show both identity problems (e.g., wishing to
be the other sex) and cross-gender behavior (e.g., wearing clothes
and playing with toys typical of the other sex; Zucker, 2004). Children
with GIDC show extreme sex atypical behavior and are not
androgynous.
• Estimates suggest 2% to 5% of the population have GIDC or subclinical
variants (Zucker & Bradley, 1995).
• Boys are referred for treatment more than girls, 3 to 6 times more in
childhood, but only 1.2 to 1.3 times more in adolescence (Zucker,
2004).
• Children with GIDC develop gender concepts later than do
typical children (Zucker et al., 1999). Extreme gender
atypicality may lead to peer exclusion in childhood and
adolescence (Zucker & Bradley, 1995).
• Individuals diagnosed with GID in adolescence are more
likely than those diagnosed in childhood to persist with GID
into adulthood (Zucker, 2004), suggesting reduced plasticity
of gender identity with age, and perhaps some misdiagnoses.
• Several broad factors have been hypothesized to cause GIDC,
including hormones, temperament, family dysfunction, and
encouragement of cross-sex behaviors (Zucker & Bradley,
1995).
 Preferences
• How satisfied are children with their sex?
Very few children in Western cultures say they want to be the other sex,
although more girls wish to be boys than vice versa, with this difference
increasing into adolescence but decreasing from the 1950s to the 1980s.
Parents of 4- to 11-yearold clinic-referred children report 1% to 16% of boys and
4% to 8% of girls wish to be the other sex, compared to 0% to 2% of boys and
2% to 5% of girls from a non-clinic sample (Zucker & Bradley, 1995).
Among typical fourth to eighth graders, gender-contentedness was higher in
boys than in girls and negatively correlated with age (Egan & Perry, 2001).
Behavioral Enactment
• Despite wide varieties of socialization pressures, cultural differences, and
even biological influences, most children develop a clear sense of self as
male or female and master the roles generally associated with their
assigned sex.
• There are separate criteria in the DSM for GID of childhood and of
adolescence/adulthood, but both sets of criteria require for diagnosis a
specific pattern of feelings and behavior.
• Some adults with GID have sex-reassignment surgery.
• Among adult males with GID, there is heterogeneity in other aspects of
gender related behavior; for example, there is an equal distribution of
those sexually attracted to biological males or females (Blanchard, 1989).
Behavior exhibited
• Transvestism: It is practice of dressing in a style or manner
traditionally associated with opposite sex.
• Transsexualism: Involve a strong desire to be the opposite sex and
undergo surgery to change their sex. Before surgery most
transsexuals report a feeling of being trapped in their body and
believe they should have been born the opposite sex.