responses to their children are regarded as one of the most important, and certainly earliest, sites where this gets done. The classic study by Rubin, Provenzano and Luria (1974), which found that parents assign characteristics to new-borns on the basis of the child’s gender and in the absence of real physical differences, has been replicated by several subsequent studies. Parents’ essentialism about gender (the belief that gender is a natural category which has innate associations with behaviour and attitudes) has been shown in a correlational study to predict their children’s gender-typed preferences (Meyer and Gelman 2016). Subsequent studies in the USA have confirmed that parents do not (or do not believe they) parent girls and boys differently (Mesman and Groeneveld 2018: 22).
Despite the evidence that parents in the USA do not explicitly parent in gender-normative ways, which is congruent with a discourse that social structures like gender and race do not determine individual’s life chances, other studies have shown that parents give both direct and indirect messages to their children about gender roles. This may involve gendering toys (that is, suggesting explicitly or implicitly that some toys are for girls and other toys are for boys) (Fisher-Thompson 1993; Seiter 1995); encouraging boys to be risk-takers and girls to be nice to others (Meyer and Gelman 2016); the distribution of household chores (Cordero-Coma and Esping-Andersen 2018); or the way that their bedrooms are decorated (MacPhee and Prendergast 2019). When families have limited budgets ‘parents are more likely to invest in developmentally enhancing activities for sons than for daughters’ (McHale et al. 2003: 133).
There is also a good deal of empirical evidence that children have different experiences with their fathers and with their mothers and that these differences are significant for children’s gendered socialization. Leaper et al. (1998) found that mothers talk more to their children but are also more negative in their talk than fathers are. Some studies have found that the differences in how fathers and mothers interact with their children are reduced if mothers work longer hours and fathers are then more involved in daily family life; that is, if there is a more gender-equal distribution of care in the home. However, an ethnography of how the migration of Filipino women has impacted on gender roles in the family as fathers are left to care for their children found that gender norms were not undermined and in fact were strengthened (Parreñas 2005).
Doing gender
Gender socialization theories have been criticized by feminist researchers for their tendency to see socialization as a smooth transmission of ideas from adults to children that reproduce gender-based inequalities. Within the sociology of childhood there is a general dislike of socialization theories because of their tendency to represent children as empty vessels into which appropriate behaviours are poured. Barrie Thorne in her ethnography of girls and boys at school, Gender Play, notes: ‘Adults are said to socialize children, teachers socialize students, the more powerful socialize, and the less powerful get socialized’ (Thorne 1993: 3). Leena Alanen (1994) notes that treating children as being in an ‘immature and socially unfinished condition’ renders them problems and victims (1994: 28), making them the concern of welfare and social policy rather than sociology. Socialization theories have taken on these criticisms and more recent work on gender socialization does increasingly recognize that children are active agents in their own socialization. William Corsaro’s concept of ‘interpretive reproduction’ captures this notion that socialization is not a transmission from adult to child but that the child is involved in an active process of interpretation and reworking of gender, race and class (Corsaro 2005: 18–27).
Another way of thinking about gender is as unavoidable social practices or what West and Zimmerman (1987) called, in their seminal paper of the same title, ‘Doing gender’. They cite Spencer Cahill’s (1986) work on gender development to illustrate their point that although gender is a performance it is not one we can refuse:
little boys appropriate the gender ideal of ‘efficaciousness’, that is, being able to affect the physical and social environment through the exercise of physical strength or appropriate skills. In contrast little girls learn to value ‘appearance’, that is, managing themselves as ornamental objects. Both classes of children learn that the recognition and use of sex categorization in interaction are not optional, but mandatory. (West and Zimmerman 1987: 141; emphasis added)
Despite West and Zimmerman’s claims of a radical break with gender socialization theories, their contribution to gender theory is more about the importance of naturally occurring data to understanding gender than it is a radical reworking of the concept of gender itself.
Judith Butler’s concept of performativity, despite having a superficial resemblance to West and Zimmerman’s theory, does pose a radical challenge to our understanding of the concept of gender and to the sex–biology/gender–culture binary that underpins most theories of gender. Like West and Zimmerman in their ethnomethodology of gender she emphasizes its performative character. They challenge the idea of gender roles on the grounds that ‘[g]ender is not merely something that happens in the nooks and crannies of interaction, fitted in here and there and not interfering with the serious business of life’ (West and Zimmerman 1987: 130), and this closely resembles Butler’s contention that gender is inescapable. The resemblance between the two theories is nonetheless superficial because the power of Butler’s theory lies in its notion that there is ‘no doer behind the deed’ (Butler 1990: 142); that is to say that there is no ungendered or universal human subject who decides to ‘do gender’. The core of Butler’s thinking about gender and other subject positions like race and sexuality is that subjectification is necessary in order to become a part of human culture (Butler 1997) – at least as human culture is currently configured. Her second major contribution to the theory of gender is that gender identification is inseparable from the normalization of heterosexual desire. There has been some interesting small-scale empirical research done using Butler’s theory on how children’s gender performativities are bound up with heterosexual discourse at a very early age (Boldt 1996; 2002; Renold 2006; Martin 2009), and on how parents’ anxieties about homosexuality impact negatively on their prior commitment to gender-neutral child-rearing (Martin 2005).
Early theories of gender socialization were rather superficial; their strength was in the way that they challenged the idea that observable differences in the behaviour of girls and boys, and women and men, were somehow natural or biological. It therefore opened up the possibilities of changing gender-based inequalities. Theories of how children come to learn to ‘do’ or perform gender retain this advantage of gender socialization theories and in addition they enable us to think of children as active participants in shaping their social worlds. Empirically perhaps there is not so much distance between them; whether we learn, practise or perform gender, the crucial point is that we cannot avoid gendered positions and practices, so long as gender is accepted as a meaningful distinction between humans.
It is also worth noting that most of the research on gender roles and gender stereotyping in childhood has been done in the USA and predominantly within social psychology. While that definitely brings limitations to our understanding of gender roles in childhood on a global scale, we can say with confidence that all societies currently organize social and cultural life along gendered lines and that most treat gender as if it is a natural (rather than cultural) attribute of people. Nonetheless, exactly how a gendered division of political economy and socio-cultural fields is organized varies considerably across the globe in both adulthood and childhood. For example, in West Africa, especially in matrilineal societies, women have prominent roles in trading at scales from the roadside market to international trading circuits (especially in cloth). The presumption in Western sociology that the gender binary women/men maps onto the binaries private/public and home/work across the entire globe is demonstrably false (Amadiume 2015; Clark 1994; 2010; Cole et al. 2007). In turn, this has important effects on gendered care of children (Oyěwùmí 2016). While young children (boys and girls) need to be kept safe and nurtured this is not necessarily the task of their birth mother but could be shared with her co-wives, with aunts and with older (usually girl) siblings and cousins (Clark 1994), and be organized around ‘complementarity
