Gender socialization is the process through which individuals learn the behaviors, expectations, and roles associated with their assigned gender within a society. Parents dressing their baby girl in pink and buying her dolls, while dressing their baby boy in blue and buying him toy trucks is an example of gender socialization.
What Is Gender Socialization? Definition and Key Points
Gender socialization often begins from a very early age for most people. It is thought that children are aware of their gender by the time they are 3 years old, long before they come to recognize any other type of group they may belong to (Stockard, 2006).
In gender socialization, it is important to distinguish between sex and gender. Sex refers to the anatomical and reproductive differences between men and women (Kretchmar, 2011), while gender is a social construct, believed to exist on a continuum, involving ideas about masculinity and femininity.
Through gender socialization, people develop their own beliefs about gender and ultimately form their own gender identity. People may not be consciously aware of the gender norm decisions that they make. Gender roles and norms are often built into the script of what a man/woman should do or be.
Examples of Gender Socialization
Gendered toy marketing is a familiar, everyday example of gender socialization. Many toy stores segregate “boy toys” from “girl toys.”
These categories reinforce what each gender is expected to do:
| Toys marketed to boys | Toys marketed to girls | |
|---|---|---|
| Typical colour | Blue | Pink |
| Typical products | Action figures, cars, and building blocks | Dolls, dress-up games, and toy cooking or cleaning sets |
| Qualities reinforced | Adventurousness, strength, and logic | Maternal warmth, physical attractiveness, and household competence |
Packaging reinforces the same message. A pink box showing a girl at play signals that a toy is “for her.”
A blue box showing a boy signals the reverse.
Evidence From Toy Preference Studies
This pattern is measurable, and measurable remarkably early.
Infants as young as three months already show different patterns of visual attention to dolls versus vehicles, depending on their own sex (Alexander, Wilcox, & Woods, 2009).
This is well before they could have learned an explicit rule about which toy “belongs” to them, or been taught one directly.
Biological accounts often cite this finding. It is also compatible with very early social shaping, because infants are handled, dressed, and spoken to differently within days of birth.
By toddlerhood, labelling alone can shift preference.
When researchers show preschoolers an unfamiliar, gender-neutral object, they arbitrarily tell the child it is “for girls” or “for boys.”
Children then rate the toy labelled for their own group more positively (Martin, Eisenbud, & Rose, 1995; Weisgram, Fulcher, & Dinella, 2014).
Nothing about the object itself differs.
That is why toy marketing counts as an agent of gender socialization, not just a neutral reflection of children’s tastes.
Agents of Gender Socialization
Those who teach gender norms are agents of socialisation. By extension, we also talk about agencies of socialisation, such as the family, the education system, and the media.
Gender socialization is a form of primary socialization which is the process by which children and infants learn the norms and behaviors associated with their gender. It is thought to occur within the family, peer groups, mass media and school curriculum (Bhattacharjee, 2021).
Parent socialization
Parents are often the first agents of gender socialization children experience. The process can begin even before birth.
Once parents learn the child’s sex, they may choose a nursery colour or “gender-appropriate” clothing before the baby arrives.
Parental language reflects this too. Girls may be called “pretty” or “delicate,” boys “strong” and “boisterous.” Children learn from this language how they should be according to their gender.
Expectations often diverge by gender as well. Girls may be encouraged toward cooking, shopping, and cleaning. Boys may be encouraged toward sports and manual repair work.
Children are especially attentive to same-gender models (Bussey & Bandura, 1999). A child who observes a same-sex parent behaving in gender-typical ways is, on this account, more likely to adopt the same behaviour.
Parents may also handle children differently by gender without meaning to. Girls may be encouraged to play quietly. Boys may be encouraged to play rougher.
Even parents who consciously try not to reinforce gender norms may pass on their own gendered upbringing anyway. This happens inadvertently, without the parent intending it.
How much do parents really differ in how they treat sons and daughters based on gender alone?
The clearest evidence that adults react differently to a baby purely because of its labelled sex comes from a classic study.
- Aim: to test whether adults describe and treat an infant differently based on its labelled sex, holding the infant itself constant.
- Method: mothers interacted with the same six-month-old infant, introduced to groups either as a girl (“Beth”) or a boy (“Adam”) (Will, Self, & Datan, 1976).
- Results: when presented as “Beth,” the baby was smiled at more, offered dolls, and described as sweet and soft-crying. The same baby presented as “Adam” was offered trains and described in masculine terms instead.
- Conclusion: because only the label varied, differences in adult behaviour could only reflect gender expectations, not any real difference in the infant. Parental gender socialization can begin before a baby shows gender-typed behaviour.
The design’s strength is its control: using one infant across conditions rules out differences between real boys and girls. It is also a small, dated, single-setting study. No large modern replication exists, and it cannot show how consequential such early differential handling proves over a child’s later development.
To see how much parents differ overall, the best evidence is the largest synthesis available.
- Aim: to establish how large and consistent parents’ differential treatment of boys and girls really is, across the whole research literature.
- Method: a meta-analysis, which pools the results of many studies into one combined analysis. It covered more than 100 studies of how parents treat sons and daughters (Lytton & Romney, 1991).
- Results: parents did encourage gender-typed activity, steering sons and daughters toward different toys and chores. This was the largest, most consistent effect; most other differences, such as discipline and warmth, were small.
- Conclusion: parents are a real but narrower source of gender-typed socialization than often assumed. The effect concentrates in the toys, clothes, and activities offered to a child.
As a meta-analysis of over a hundred studies, it deserves more weight than any single observational study. It is not a controlled causal test, though, because most of the studies it pools were correlational.
Peer socialization
Children can also be socialized by their peers. This happens in ways that differ by gender.
By around age three, children often prefer playing with peers of the same gender (Wharton, 2005). This pattern shows up across many cultures and lasts until adolescence.
One explanation is simple. Boys and girls tend to play differently and seek out others with a similar style (Stockard, 2006).
Girls typically form close friendships within small groups and take conversational turns. Boys typically play in larger groups, more roughly, using interruption and boasting.
Peers “police” each other’s gender conformity too. Girls face less pressure than boys to conform to gender norms. They are also less likely to receive negative attention for joining “cross-gender” activities and games (Wharton, 2005).
The most detailed account of how peers do this comes from a long ethnography of children at school.
- Aim: to understand how school-age children themselves, not only adults, create and enforce the meaning of gender in everyday peer interaction.
- Method: an ethnography, meaning long-term observation in a natural setting. The researcher spent two years watching fourth- and fifth-grade children in classrooms and on playgrounds at two American elementary schools (Thorne, 1993).
- Results: children policed and negotiated gender boundaries themselves. They did so through “chase and kiss” games, gossip about who was developing physically, and shifting alliances that crossed or hardened gender lines.
- Conclusion: peer culture is not just a channel for adult-taught norms. Children are active co-constructors of gender, improvising, contesting, and sometimes subverting the categories adults hand them.
The close-up method captures how children build gender moment to moment, which surveys and experiments cannot. But two schools in one place and decade cannot show how typical the patterns are.
School socialization
Teachers and other educators may place expectations on children based on their gender.
They could do this by labeling and organizing students in group activities or creating different activities for boys and girls. As with parents, teachers may use gendered language when speaking to and about boys and girls. Small cues can add up.
Schools may encourage boys to engage in science or mathematics whereas they may be more forgiving if girls are not succeeding in these subjects.
Teachers may also discipline students in different ways depending on their gender, which may reinforce children’s beliefs and assumptions.
Schools also teach gender through a hidden curriculum. Seating arrangements, praise, discipline, and subject encouragement can all track gender, even when no formal policy requires it.
Usually, nobody intends this. Gender-differentiated treatment persists as an unexamined side effect of ordinary classroom practice.
Media socialization
Gender socialization through media happens through movies, television, and literature.
It can reinforce stereotypes about what it means to be a boy or a girl.
Men are often cast as heroes going on adventures. Women, by contrast, are usually outnumbered by male characters.
They are often shown as physically attractive and frequently introduced only as the male lead’s love interest.
Female characters are often passive, needing to be rescued by men, and dressed to appeal to the male gaze.
Children who watch a lot of TV absorb this. They tend to hold more sex-stereotypical views of men and women.
This shapes their toy choices, career aspirations, and self-esteem (Burn, 1996).
Media portrayal is starting to shift.
Even so, much older media still shows women doing housework or as stay-at-home mothers, and men engaged in a wider range of activity.
The classic demonstration of how skewed portrayals can be comes from an analysis of the books young children are read.
- Aim: to document systematically how male and female characters are portrayed in the picture books most used with pre-school children.
- Method: a content analysis, which systematically counts and classifies the content of texts, of a large sample of commonly used pre-school picture books. It coded the number and activities of male and female characters (Weitzman, Eifler, Hokada, & Ross, 1972).
- Results: males outnumbered females roughly eleven to one among humans, and by far more among animals. Males were active and outdoors; females were mostly domestic, and no book showed an adult woman with an occupation outside the home.
- Conclusion: children met a narrow, lopsided model of what each gender does and can do before they could read for themselves.
Counting rather than relying on impression makes the finding hard to dismiss. But the sample is now more than fifty years old. Later research using the same method finds the imbalance has narrowed considerably without disappearing.
Theories to Explain Gender Socialization
Each theory below explains gender socialization through a different mechanism:
- Social learning: Children copy same-sex models and are rewarded or punished for gender-appropriate and gender-inappropriate behavior.
- Gender codes: Unspoken assumptions about men’s and women’s proper roles are passed down and renegotiated by each generation.
- Cognitive development: Children’s ideas about gender change with age, and gender constancy is thought to motivate gender-appropriate behavior.
- Gender schema: Children use gender as a category for organizing information, and these schemas tend to be polarized.
- Psychoanalytic: Unconscious identification with the mother is said to shape boys’ and girls’ gender identity in different ways.
- Biological: Early hormone exposure may nudge children’s starting play preferences, working alongside social input.
Social learning theory
Social learning theory is most closely associated with psychologist Albert Bandura.
It rests on the behaviorist approach, which explains learning through stimulus and response.
The theory holds that gender socialization comes from reinforcement. Children are rewarded, or punished, for gender-appropriate and gender-inappropriate behavior (Wharton, 2005).
For example, a boy who plays with a “gender appropriate” toy such as a football may get positive reinforcement from his father.
If he instead plays with a “gender inappropriate” toy such as a doll, he may be ignored or met with negative attention.
Children are also thought to learn from their same-sex parent.
A girl learns what it means to be female by observing her mother; a boy learns what it means to be male by observing his father.
Research has undercut the theory on one key point. Parents who show sex-stereotypical behavior are no more likely than other parents to raise children who do the same (Stockard, 2006).
The meta-analysis described under Contemporary Research points the same way. It found no detectable effect of parental gender or sexual orientation on children’s gender-typed development (Fedewa et al., 2015).
Children are also not the passive learners the theory assumes.
They are more active participants in their own socialization than social learning theory suggests (Wharton, 2005).
Gender codes
Gender codes are hidden, unspoken assumptions about the proper roles of men and women which are transmitted through the socialization process and are negotiated by each generation. Gender codes are not uniform but vary with location.
Traditional gender codes tend to be stronger in the working class than the middle class. Still, everyone has access to both conservative and radical gender codes, and must negotiate their own balance between them.
Cognitive development theory
Cognitive development theories of gender socialization build on the research of psychologist Jean Piaget.
These theories treat the socialization process as developmental. Children are thought to play an active role in shaping their own gender identity (Stockard, 2006).
Psychologist Lawrence Kohlberg was among the first to apply cognitive-developmental ideas to gender identity. He argued that children’s views of appropriate gender roles change as they age, reflecting their changing cognitive development (Kohlberg, 1966).
Younger children hold the most rigid definitions of gender. They are also more likely to punish others for violating gender norms. As cognitive flexibility develops, gender stereotypes and roles become more flexible too.
Kohlberg held that once children develop gender constancy, the recognition that their own gender is stable and unchanging, they become more motivated to display gender-appropriate behavior (Wharton, 2005).
Children are not just passive learners here. Cognitive development theory expands on social learning theory in this respect. It holds that ideas about gender keep changing as children get older.
However, children show clearly gendered behavior as young as two or three. This is well before gender constancy typically develops. It undercuts Kohlberg’s claim that constancy is the trigger for gender-appropriate behavior (Martin & Ruble, 2004).
One early test did support part of Kohlberg’s mechanism.
- Aim: to test Kohlberg’s prediction that children attend selectively to same-sex models only once they have achieved gender constancy.
- Method: children of different ages were assessed for gender constancy, then tested on their attention to same-sex and opposite-sex adult models (Slaby & Frey, 1975).
- Results: children who had achieved gender constancy paid markedly more attention to same-sex models than children who had not.
- Conclusion: gender constancy does seem to raise children’s motivation to attend to same-sex models, which supports Kohlberg’s mechanism over a purely reinforcement-based account.
The two findings fit together if constancy sharpens an orientation toward same-sex models that already exists, rather than triggering gender-typed behavior. That is a more modest role than Kohlberg claimed.
Gender schema theory
Gender schema theory was introduced by psychologist Sandra Bem (1981). She argued that children learn about gender roles from the culture they live in.
Cultures vary in this respect. Where gender differences are emphasized, children learn to use gender as a way to organize information about the world.
Gender schemas help children organize information and maintain a sense of consistency and predictability (Stockard, 2006). These schemas tend to be polarized. Children come to understand what they believe is acceptable and appropriate for each gender.
Gender schemas make new situations more predictable. Children build more elaborate schemas as their gender identity and understanding of gender roles develop.
The theory suggests these schemas are internalized so that males and masculinity are seen as the norm, valued more highly than females and femininity (Wharton, 2005).
A closely related schematic processing model is more specific. Children first sort information into “same-gender” and “other-gender” categories (Martin & Halverson, 1981).
They then build a detailed schema only for their own gender. The other gender’s schema stays cruder. This helps explain why children’s stereotypes about their own gender are often more nuanced than their beliefs about the opposite gender.
Two central claims of the theory have been tested directly. First, a basic gender schema forms very early. Second, it actively organizes children’s play.
- Aim: to establish when children’s gender schemas begin to organize their behaviour, and what part environmental input plays in building them.
- Method: children’s emerging understanding of gender categories and gender-typed activity was assessed. It was then related to their later play and to their gendered environment, such as parental attitudes and toys (Fagot & Leinbach, 1989).
- Results: children who could label gender categories and sort activities by gender showed more gender-typed play later. The content and speed of each child’s schema varied with the input they had received.
- Conclusion: schemas are neither purely internal nor a passive mirror of the environment. They develop through the child’s own categorizing and the gendered information around them.
The study turns an abstract idea, the gender schema, into measurable labelling and sorting behaviour. But it is correlational, so it cannot separate cause from effect. Children with gender-typed interests may also draw more gender-typed responses from parents.
One limitation is the problem of individual differences. The theory does not explain why children who share much the same environment respond differently to gender-appropriate behavior.
A related question is whether this process is specific to gender at all. A classic experiment tested it.
- Aim: to test whether sorting children into a meaningless social category is enough to produce biased attitudes like those seen for gender and race.
- Method: elementary-school children were randomly assigned to wear blue or yellow t-shirts. In some classrooms, teachers used the colour groups, for example lining children up by colour; in others they did not (Bigler, Jones, & Lobliner, 1997).
- Results: where teachers used the groups, children showed clear in-group favouritism and biased attitudes toward the other colour group, resembling patterns seen for gender and race.
- Conclusion: stereotyping may need nothing unique to gender: it can arise whenever adults make any category salient. Sorting children less by gender might, in principle, reduce it.
Using a meaningless category isolates the categorizing process. But a t-shirt group is a far weaker category than gender, which children meet from birth. The study shows a plausible mechanism, not gender stereotyping’s only cause.
Psychoanalytic theory
The psychoanalytic theory of gender socialization is different from the learning theories above. It was not outlined until the 1970s, by Nancy Chodorow, building on the work of Sigmund Freud.
The theory suggests some aspects of gender identity come from unconscious psychological processes, not from conscious modeling or schemas.
A key factor is the mother’s role as primary caregiver. Because children spend more early time with mothers, Chodorow argues their first identification is with the feminine.
Girls’ development is therefore comparatively simple: they have already identified with the mother. Boys, however, must first reject that feminine identification.
They then construct masculinity as “not feminine.” In this process, boys also learn to devalue femininity.
Criticisms of psychoanalytic theory for gender socialization are that the theory is hard to empirically verify.
It also reinforces gender stereotypes, places too much emphasis on the unconscious, and does not explain how children who were not raised by mothers develop their gender identity.
Biological and Hormonal Perspectives
Biological accounts ask a different question: not how culture teaches gender, but whether some gender-typed behavior has roots that predate any teaching.
They propose that prenatal hormone exposure and brain organization shape average differences in play and interests. Culture then builds on this foundation (Hines, 2011).
Sociologist R. W. Connell reviewed a century of research on the physiological mechanisms a strong biological-determinist position would need. He concluded that none linking supposed innate predispositions to the complexity of gendered behavior had been convincingly demonstrated (Connell, 1987).
More recent hormonal research has reopened part of that question.
Congenital Adrenal Hyperplasia
The clearest natural experiment comes from children with congenital adrenal hyperplasia (CAH).
This condition exposes female fetuses to unusually high levels of androgens, the male-typical hormones, before birth. Girls with CAH consistently show more male-typical play in childhood than their unaffected female relatives.
These girls are otherwise raised and socialized as girls. The finding is therefore hard to explain by socialization alone, and it is among the most cited evidence for a biological contribution to gender-typed play.
Ordinary Hormone Variation in Boys
Does ordinary variation in early hormones, not just the extreme case of CAH, predict gender-typed behavior? A study using a physical marker of androgen exposure tested this.
- Aim: to test whether the normal androgen surge in male infants in the first months of life (“mini-puberty”) predicts later sex-typed play in typically developing boys.
- Method: researchers measured penile growth from birth to three months, a marker of androgen exposure, in 81 boys. Parents later completed a questionnaire on the boys’ sex-typed play at ages three to four (Pasterski et al., 2015).
- Results: greater penile growth in early infancy predicted more male-typical play. This held after accounting for prenatal androgen exposure, which also predicted play independently.
- Conclusion: ordinary variation in the postnatal androgen surge, not just extreme prenatal exposure, appears to contribute independently to how strongly boys later show sex-typed play.
Using a physical growth marker avoids hormone measures that are hard to obtain and validate in infancy. But the design is correlational, the sample is modest, and the finding awaits independent replication.
How Biology and Socialization Fit Together
Wider reviews agree. Early hormone exposure is linked to average differences in gender-typed play and interests. It is one influence among several, not a determinant that overrides social input (Hines, 2011).
Hormonal and social influences are not rivals. They look more like parts of one story.
Early androgen exposure may nudge the starting point of a child’s play preferences, particularly for boys. Parents, peers, media, and children’s own thinking then reinforce, elaborate, or sometimes counteract it. Few studies have modelled both together.
Critical Evaluation
Most gender-development research is correlational, not experimental.
Cause and effect are therefore often unclear: a child who already prefers gender-typed toys may draw more gender-typed encouragement from parents, rather than the encouragement creating the preference.
These measurement tools are not neutral either. Older questionnaires decide in advance which traits count as “masculine” or “feminine.” They can build in the very assumptions under test. They have faced exactly this criticism (Bem, 1974).
Treating “male” and “female” as simple, fixed starting categories is itself a live methodological caution, not a neutral assumption (Connell, 1987).
More recent hormonal and neurological research has reopened part of this question, showing that early biology can also play a modest, contributing role (Hines, 2011).
A newer, more radical social constructionist perspective goes further still.
It questions not just how gender is learned, but whether the underlying sex categories are as fixed as the socialization model assumes.
West and Zimmerman called their account “doing gender.” They reframed gender not as a stable trait a person has, but as something continuously produced through everyday interaction. People are held accountable, moment to moment, for acting in recognizably masculine or feminine ways (West & Zimmerman, 1987).
Judith Butler’s related concept of performativity argues that repeated, culturally scripted acts do not just express a pre-existing gender identity but actively constitute it (Butler, 1990). In plain terms, gender is created by acting it out.
Gender seems like a stable inner essence only because people perform it so consistently and so rarely interrupt it.
On this view, even the line between “biological” sex and “social” gender is itself a product of culture.
The three perspectives can be compared on what they claim and where each is strongest and weakest:
| Perspective | Core claim | Strength | Limitation |
|---|---|---|---|
| Biological | Part of the average difference in play and interests comes from prenatal and early postnatal hormone exposure. | Independent, quasi-experimental evidence from naturally occurring hormone variation. | Historically overreached from small population averages to claims about what individuals can or should do. |
| Social learning and cognitive-developmental | Gender-typed behavior comes mainly from reinforcement, modelling, and children’s developing categories. | Many testable, mechanism-specific predictions. | Some predictions, such as strong same-sex modelling, have not held up well under test. |
| Social constructionist | Gender is continuously produced through interaction, and sex categories are less fixed than assumed. | Shows how much of what looks natural is sustained by ongoing social practice. | Harder to turn into falsifiable, quantitative predictions. |
Taken together, the evidence is pluralistic rather than settled. Biology contributes a real but moderate influence, learning and schema research find real mechanisms, and constructionism complicates the categories both assume.
Contemporary Research
Does a child need a same-sex parent to develop typically gendered behavior? This question sits at the heart of social learning theory.
The strongest available test comes from a large-scale synthesis of children raised by same-gender parents.
- Aim: to test whether parental gender and sexual orientation measurably affect children’s gender-typed behavior and identity.
- Method: a meta-analysis (a statistical method that combines the results of many studies) of 33 published and unpublished studies. It covered over 5,000 children and adolescents raised by same-gender or different-gender parents (Fedewa, Black, & Ahn, 2015).
- Results: across studies that specifically assessed gender-role development, parental gender and sexual orientation showed no significant effect on children’s gender-typed behavior or identity.
- Conclusion: this is difficult to reconcile with a strong version of same-sex-modelling theory. Other agents, such as peers and media, appear to do most of the work of gender socialization, largely independent of parental gender.
With over 5,000 children pooled, this meta-analysis sits near the top of the evidence hierarchy for this question. It does not show that modelling never matters, though.
Children in every family type still meet many same-sex models outside the home, such as peers, teachers, and media figures. The finding suggests parental modelling is not necessary for typical gender development. The pooled studies also mostly use small, volunteer samples.
Early biology adds a further strand.
A study of 81 typically developing boys found that penile growth over the first three months predicted later sex-typed play (Pasterski et al., 2015). The link held independently of prenatal androgen exposure.
Gender stereotypes also take hold early. Solbes-Canales et al. (2020) gave two tasks to 149 Spanish schoolchildren aged four to nine. Even the youngest children had already absorbed traditional gender roles, especially when assigning masculine attributes. The bias grew much stronger as they got older.
How Does Gender Socialization Affect Society?
Inequalities in the workplace
Gender socialization shapes several documented forms of workplace and economic inequality:
- Devalued labor: Tasks and behaviors associated with femininity, such as housework and childcare, are often unpaid and unappreciated because they are coded feminine.
- Employer bias: Because feminine-coded labor is devalued, some employers hold the bias that women are weaker workers, especially given assumed extra labor at home.
- Wage gap: Women can still be paid less than men for equivalent work, and women-dominated fields such as healthcare are often underpaid relative to male-dominated roles.
- Motherhood penalty: Mothers can face a workforce “penalty” in opportunities and advancement that is not extended to fathers.
Negative attitudes about different genders
Children often favor their own gender. This attitude can show up as discriminatory behavior toward other genders.
Adults may reinforce this gender-segregated behavior. It can become a problem once children need to function in gender-integrated settings such as school.
Children who cannot relate well to other genders may find their differences reinforced rather than reduced.
Both boys and girls tend to associate positive characteristics with their own gender at first. Does this hold steady with age? One influential study tested this directly, alongside whether any such belief already shapes children’s own interests.
- Aim: to test whether young children link brilliance, being “really, really smart,” more with men than women, and whether this shapes their own interests.
- Method: children aged five to seven guessed the gender of a “really, really smart” character. They were offered novel games framed as for “really, really smart” children or for those who “try really, really hard” (Bian, Leslie, & Cimpian, 2017).
- Results: at age five, boys and girls equally linked brilliance to their own gender. By six and seven, girls were less likely than boys to link brilliance to their own gender, and lost interest specifically in the “smart” game.
- Conclusion: a stereotype linking brilliance to men emerges around the start of formal schooling. It already measurably narrows girls’ own interest in activities marketed as being for exceptionally clever children.
Pairing a belief measure with a matching behavioural measure is unusually strong evidence that the stereotype has real motivational consequences. It is, however, one research team’s work with American children. The age at which the shift appears, and its size, would benefit from independent replication in other settings.
Girls can develop negative feelings about their own gender. Their sense of their own abilities can suffer too.
Strict societal ideas about gender can also make life harder for people who are non-binary, transgender, or who otherwise do not conform to their assigned birth gender.
It can be difficult for these individuals to be their true selves in a society that treats gender as a strict binary.
Limitations for men
Gender socialization limits men as well as women. It can restrict them in several ways:
- Career pressure: Boys and men can feel pressure to succeed and dominate in their careers. Falling short of that can feel like failure.
- Affection and anger: Men and boys may avoid affectionate expression with peers, treating anger as the one acceptable emotional outlet.
- Hidden vulnerability: Vulnerable emotions and crying often get coded as feminine, so boys and men avoid showing them in front of others.
- Bullying: A boy who shows typically “feminine” traits risks being bullied. He learns not to display them again.
- Mental health: Suppressing vulnerable emotion can damage men’s mental health and make them less likely to seek help when struggling.
- Violence: Socialization toward aggression is also linked to higher rates of violence, including against women (Marcus, 2018).
Frequently Asked Questions
How does gender socialization relate to gender stereotypes?
Gender stereotyping is where a set of attributes, characteristics, or roles are ascribed to people simply because of their gender.
People are thought to be socialized into holding these stereotypes.
Societies often have fixed ideas about each gender.
When these ideas are socialized into children, they can grow up holding stereotypes about other genders, or feeling pressure to conform to their own.
According to cognitive-developmental theory, gender stereotypes become more flexible as cognitive flexibility develops.
Yet stereotypes appear early. In one study of Spanish children aged four to nine, gender bias grew stronger with age (Solbes-Canales et al., 2020).
This falls unevenly by gender. Female stereotypes tend to be less restrictive than male ones.
Females are generally less scrutinized than males for not adhering to their gender’s stereotypes (Wharton, 2005).
How does gender socialization relate to sexism?
The persistence of traditional gender roles exacerbates gender inequalities, encourages rigid behaviors, and maintains unbalanced power relations within societies in favor of men (Marcus, 2018).
With society having the attitude that women are weaker or less competent than men at the same work, this can lead to discriminatory behavior towards women.
The roots of prejudices, discrimination, and violence against women can be traced back to widespread gender stereotypes, which come from gender socialization (McCarthy et al., 2018).
Is gender socialization important?
Gender socialization is thought to be important since it helps individuals to develop their gender identity – deeply held internal perception of one’s gender.
Being aware of gender socialization and gender roles means that individuals can choose what they most identify with and develop their own identities.
Can gender socialization occur throughout life?
Gender socialization is a lifelong process, though most of it happens during childhood. Beliefs about gender learned early can affect people for the rest of their lives.
New ideas can still be learned in adulthood. Through this ongoing socialization, people shape their own beliefs about what they can achieve.
For instance, a man may believe he is capable of succeeding in his career. A woman, by contrast, may think she has less chance of success simply because she is a woman.
Can gender socialization be tackled?
It helps to become more aware of how you have been socialized based on your assigned gender. From there, you can ask whether a decision reflects that socialization or your own choice.
Parents and educators can also act directly so children are not restricted by their gender.
Using gender-neutral language is one option. It ensures boys and girls are spoken to in similar ways.
Encouraging a wide range of toys and activities helps too. So does creating playful environments where children of different genders interact.
Discussing and challenging gender stereotypes, rather than emphasizing gender differences, is another option. Children then learn they need not stay confined to traditional gender roles.
Key Takeaways
- Definition: Gender socialization is how a culture’s gender-related rules, norms, and expectations are learned, from early childhood onward.
- Early Start: Children are aware of their own gender by around age three, before they recognize other social groups.
- Sex vs. Gender: Sex refers to anatomical differences between men and women; gender is the socially constructed overlay of masculinity and femininity built on top of it.
- Key Agents: Parents, peers, schools, and media each shape gender-typed behavior, mainly through the toys, activities, and language offered to a child.
- Competing Theories: Social learning, cognitive-developmental, gender schema, and psychoanalytic theories each explain gender socialization differently, and each has documented limitations.
- Modern Evidence: A large meta-analysis found no reliable effect of parental gender or sexual orientation on children’s own gender-typed development (Fedewa et al., 2015).
- Biology: Early hormone exposure appears to make a modest contribution to average differences in children’s play, working alongside social input (Hines, 2011; Pasterski et al., 2015).
- Lifelong Process: Gender socialization does not end in childhood; new expectations continue to be learned and renegotiated throughout life.
References
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