Gender Stereotypes In Children

Raising a child is one of the hardest challenges to be done – to educate a child in a way that it has adequate morals standards and will live a successful life. One of the most recent concerns is the topic of racism, sexism and in general prejudice and stereotypes; especially today, people try more and more to treat everybody equal, which is an honourable development. In the course of this, most parents want to prevent their child from developing biases and prejudices – but in how far are they conveying them unconsciously?

Even though not everything parents tell their children has an impact on them, the gender roles they present do strongly. Already at a quite young age, children tend to assume certain characteristics of males and females on

They tend to overestimate the ability of their child when its sex is favoured by the stereotype or on the contrary if they are not favoured to underestimate their ability (Jacobs & Eccles, 1992). This effect is illustrated by a study about reading abilities, which also shows that parents are not the only ones that influence their child: stereotypically girls are favoured in terms of reading. Teachers that had strong gender stereotypes influenced the self reading concepts of boys in grade 6 negatively unrelated to their actual performance, while no effect for girls was found (Retelsdorf, Schwartz, & Asbrock, 2015).

Another negative effect that is created by conveying stereotypical gender roles is associated with the occupation the children choose in later years. Girls who spent more time with their fathers in their childhood were less likely to choose a gender-typical career, but boys that spent more time with their fathers were more likely to pursue a gender typical occupation, which shows the impact of the family even 15 years later; more traditional attitudes of the mothers also led to a more gender typical occupation for boys only (Lawson, Crouter, & McHale,

39.7 percent of women worked 2009 in female-dominated occupations, while only 4.5 percent of men were employed there; in contrast to that, in male-dominated jobs worked 43.6 percent of men and 5.5 percent of women (Hegewisch, Liepmann, Hayes, & Hartmann, 2010). Why is this a problem? First of all, it is preventing economic growth when skilled and talented workers choose not their ideal occupation because of barriers like a lack of information and discouragement, not a lack of interest ( Hill, Corbett, & Rose (2010) as cited in Hegewisch et al.,2010). Besides that, it is involved in the gender wage gap – female-dominated occupations of the same skill level as male-dominated occupations provide a lower wage (England, Allison, & Wu (2006) as cited in Hegewisch et al.,