Around the age of three, children learn about gender stability and show gender stereotyping similar to adults regarding toys, clothes, activities, games, colors, and even specific personality descriptions. Ĭhildren continuously learn about the differences between male and female behaviors and objects of use in a specific culture through observation. Girls know about gender earlier than boys, and 2-year-old girls can associate toys (e.g., dolls or cars) with gender. When they see pictures of males engaging in female stereotypic activities (e.g., applying lipstick), they stare at the pictures for a longer time. Many young children before two years of age can integrate more clues (e.g., hairstyle, voice, and clothing) to correctly label men or women (including themselves), to verbally express gender nouns (e.g., girl and boy), and to understand gender differences. By about 9 to 11 months old, they can distinguish between male and female groups by face and have the ability to intermodally associate features (e.g., associating faces and voices). Studies show that infants aged 3 to 4 months can distinguish between male and female groups by facial features alone. Infants and young children quickly develop gender-related concepts that lead them to engage in specific activities, to discover exciting things, and to achieve goals in the process. Gender is one of the most important social categories. However, if lacking flexibility, social categorization becomes an obstacle for individuals to understand the world. Social categorization can help individuals organize social and interpersonal information efficiently. One is to emphasize the characteristics shared within a group and to reduce individual differences among group members, thus generating stereotypes the other is to strengthen and concentrate on the differences among different groups. Social categorization involves two processes. Human beings often categorize individuals based on background characteristics (e.g., gender, age, race, or religion), personality traits, interests (e.g., extroversion and hobbies), and occupation and apply their presupposition of the group to individuals. Grouping according to the essential traits of individuals is called social categorization. Children form concepts by classifying things according to certain similarities, which is the basis for them to understand and organize the world. Human beings possess necessary classification abilities from infancy, which develops gradually with cognitive ability and learning experience. Humans have a natural tendency to classify things. Our findings suggest that cognitive-based interventions, such as a gender equality curriculum, have the potential to break gender stereotypes in kindergarten children. Children in the control group were more likely to maintain their gender stereotypic relationship choices in PCTs. After the interventions, the gender stereotypic relationship dropped to 73.22% in the experimental group. Before interventions, 87.50% of the children chose a gender stereotypic relationship, while 12.50% chose script/other relationships in PCT. The picture classification task (PCT) was measured before and after the intervention to assess gender stereotypes. The experimental group consisted of a gender equality curriculum including script relationship training for two months, while the control group continued their regular curriculum. One of the two classes was randomly selected as the experimental group ( n = 28), and the other was the control group ( n = 26). Fifty-four children (61–79 months old) from two public kindergarten classes in northern Taiwan participated in this study. We aimed to determine whether exposure to counter-stereotypical information could break gender stereotypes in kindergarten children. Cognitive-based interventions have been widely used in school settings and have been suggested to play important roles in children’s gender stereotyping and in their processing of counter-stereotypic information. Despite the growing recognition of gender equality worldwide, plausible strategies that reduce young children’s gender stereotypes remain limited.
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