A cartoon girl and blue, colored pink and blue, respectively. Image via Flickr, CC BY-NC 2.0
Gender bias affects everyone whether it be for leadership roles, basic skills or deciding on roles in the household. Some people try to stop this gender bias, but it influences them before they are born due how the child’s guardians act. Since the world is gender-biased, people’s brains develop to be gender-biased. The differences assumed between each gender are called “gender tribes” which creates gender labels. The divisions created by this gender-bias affects the foundation of everyone’s life negatively.
The Effects Of Focusing on One Skill Set
A child’s upbringing may affect many developmental skills such as motor, social and emotional. Gender bias leads people to believe that one gender is more successful in each of these skills than the other. For example, mothers who know that their baby is going to be a male tend to use words such as “vigorous” or “strong” when explaining baby kicks according to a BBC article. This belief lets parents emphasize their son’s physical development more than their daughter’s. People tend to overestimate the son’s crawling abilities even though there is no physical difference between the genders. When a parent focuses more on one type of skill than the rest, it can cause poor development, which further influences the stereotypes placed on children. The child will continue to grow this way and end up falling into the trap of gender-bias.
Affecting Childhood Development
As children grow up, they start to play and experiment with toys. What they play with affects development and their interests. Boys tend to get toys such as building blocks, play tools or cars while girls tend to get toys such as dolls or beauty sets. Being selective on what type of toy a child can play with only allows them to associate themselves with these interests.
Boys enjoy playing with dolls, but they rarely recieve them as gifts. Even marketing affects the attractiveness of the toy. Girls will gravitate towards toys designed for boys if they are pink. Colors become an important part of the developmental process, so when a child resonates a specific color to themselves, they will stick towards that color and not experiment. This guides children to stay in a specific mindset as they grow up, which can prevent them from finding their real interests and skills.
“Boys in the first years of life are also nurturing and caring. We just teach them really early that that is a ‘girl skill’, and we punish boys for doing it,” Christia Brown, a professor of psychology at the University of Kentucky said in a BBC article.
This heavily influences the child especially since preschool children tend to notice the differences between how boys and girls are treated by adultsThings like tone and toys can point out the differences for each gender tribe. Since children try to figure out where they feel comfortable at such a young age, the gender tribes tend to create societal comfort. Therefore, children start to follow the stereotypes placed, which affects their adulthood.
The Effects of Stereotyping
As stereotyping continues, it affects women’s and men’s behavior. For example, women tend to underestimate their abilities on specific things like math or science, while men will usually overestimate. Women will also do worse on a test if they are told that their sex tends to performs worse. Even though it is not believed so, there is no biological difference in the brain due to someone’s gender. They both react to psychological responses the same, but each sex reacts in different amounts due to the stereotypes that the brain has learned at an early age.
Things that seem innocent during childhood, such as princesses, also affect an adult’s behavior. Girls that are into princesses at a young age tend to be more concerned with their appearance and see themselves as a sexual object according to the same article. This is linked to men using sexual violence against women due to the belief that men are naturally violent and need to have sexual fulfillment, while women are perceived to be naturally submissive just like princesses.
Stereotyping At A Young Age
Caving into this stereotype at such a young age makes it difficult to create further developments in skills that are outside of someone’s designated gender tribe. This also creates sexism throughout social interactment, jobs, schooling and much more
The Mental Effect
Societies focus on gender stereotyping. Gender stereotyping creates an anxiety about presenting more feminine or masculine, which can lead a child to have to feel left out, if they do not present a certain way. The brain is hardwired to worry about reputation, which influences people to find comfort and success of being well associated with others.
