How gender stereotypes are formed

2024 Author: Malcolm Clapton | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 03:44

An excerpt from neuroscientist Gina Rippon's book on male and female brain research.

Despite the apparent helplessness and passivity of newborn human beings, and their developing brains, it is clear that they are equipped with an excellent "kit of essentials". Babies, like sponges, absorb information about the world around them, and this means that we need to be especially careful about what the world is telling our babies about. What rules and guidelines do they find in the world? Are these rules the same for all children? What events and what life experiences can have an impact on the final product?

One of the earliest, loudest and most powerful signals that a child receives is, of course, a signal about the differences between boys and girls, men and women. Gender and gender divisions are everywhere: children's clothes and toys, books, education, careers, films and books, not to mention the everyday "random" sexism.

Just walk through the supermarket and you'll see endless rows of gender-tinged products - shower gels (Tropical Shower for women, Muscle Buck for men), cough drops, garden gloves, a mix of dried fruit and nuts (Energy Blast "For men and" Power of life "for women), Christmas chocolate sets (with wrenches and screwdrivers for boys, jewelry and cosmetics for girls). All this says one thing, and as soon as you feel a sore throat or remember the roses in your garden, an object with a gender label is immediately tucked in.

Of course, after all, a "real man" will not go into the garden with gloves of the "wrong" kind, and a "real woman" will not even accidentally soap herself with "Pumped up muscles."

In June 1986, I went to the delivery room to give birth to Daughter # 2. Gary Lineker scored a stunning World Championship goal that night. Together with my daughter, eight more babies were born, all boys, and they were allegedly named Gary (I also wanted to). My neighbors and I were reading notes received from loved ones (not about football), when we suddenly heard a sound, as if from an approaching steam locomotive, louder every second: our new children were being transported to us. My neighbor was handed a blue package and the nurse commented approvingly, “Here's Gary. He has already stretched his lungs!"

I received my intended package, wrapped in a yellow blanket (the first and hard-won feminist victory), and the nurse sighed, “Here's yours. The loudest of all. Doesn't look like a girl at all! At the tender age of ten minutes, my daughter first encountered the gender division of the world she had just arrived in.

Stereotypes have become such an integral part of our world that we can compile a long list of "characteristics" of people (countries, types of activity, etc.) at the first request. And if we compare our list with the list of friends or neighbors, we will find a lot of matches.

Stereotypes are cognitive shortcuts, pictures in our heads.

When we are faced with people, situations, events, are going to do something, these pictures allow the brain to create its own predictions and fill in the gaps, to develop preliminary predictions that determine our behavior. Stereotypes take up a lot of space in the repository of social vocabulary and social memory common to other members of our society. […]

As we already know, our social brain is a kind of "scavenger" that collects rules. He looks for laws in our social system, as well as “important” and “desirable” characteristics that we must acquire in order to correspond to the group of “ours” that we have identified. This will inevitably include stereotypical information about how “people like us” should look like, how we should behave, what we can and cannot. There seems to be a fairly low threshold for this aspect of our identity as it is very easy to cross.

We have seen that certain manipulations involving the threat of stereotype confirmation can be completely invisible. You don't need to be reminded too often that you are an ineffective woman to become an ineffective woman. And you don't even need to be reminded that you are a woman, your “I” will do the rest. This applies even to four-year-old girls. A colored picture in which a girl is playing with a doll is already associated with poor results in the space perception assignment.

The neural networks in the brain involved in processing and storing social cues differ from those involved in working with more general knowledge. And the networks responsible for stereotypes overlap those responsible for subjective self-identification and self-identification in society. Therefore, attempts to challenge stereotypes, especially in ideas about oneself ("I am a man, and therefore …", "I am a woman, and therefore …"), will entail a very quick connection to a common repository of knowledge, where, in any case, there is enough information. Beliefs of this kind are very deeply embedded in the process of socialization, which is the very essence of the human being.

Some stereotypes have their own positive reinforcement system that, when triggered, will provide behaviors associated with the stereotyped characteristic.

[…] Stereotypes about “girls” and “boys” toys can affect a range of skills: girls who think Lego is designed for boys perform worse on construction tasks.

Sometimes a stereotype can become a cognitive hook or a scapegoat. In this case, poor performance or lack of ability can be attributed to the characteristic associated with the stereotype. For example, in the past, premenstrual syndrome has been used to explain phenomena that might just as well be related to other factors, and we discussed this in Chapter 2. Scientists have found that women often attribute their bad mood to biological problems associated with menstruation. although other factors may have been the cause, to the same extent.

Some stereotypes are both prescriptive and descriptive: if you emphasize the negative side of an ability or character, the stereotype will “prescribe” appropriate or inappropriate actions. Stereotypes also carry powerful signals that one group is better at something than another, and that there are things that members of one group simply “cannot” do, and should not be done, that is, they emphasize the division into “higher and lower ". The stereotype that women cannot engage in science implies that they are not engaged in science, leaving science to male scientists (and they themselves become such pretty helpers). […]

Last year, the youth charity Girlguiding conducted a study and reported the results: girls already at the age of seven feel the pressure of gender stereotypes. Researchers surveyed about two thousand children and found that for this reason, almost 50% of respondents do not feel like speaking out or participating in school activities.

“We teach girls that the most important virtue for them is to be liked by others, and that a good girl behaves calmly and delicately,” the scientists noted in the comments.

Obviously, such stereotypes are far from harmless. They have a real impact on girls (and boys) and the decisions they make in their lives. We should not forget that the development of a child's social brain is inextricably linked with the search for social rules and expectations that correspond to a member of a social group. Obviously, gender / gender stereotypes create very different sets of rules for boys and girls. The external signals that little women receive do not give them the confidence they need to achieve future heights of success. […]

Along with the ability to recognize gender categories and associated characteristics, children seem eager to match the preferences and activities of their own gender, as evidenced by studies of the PKK phenomenon (“pink lace dress”). As soon as the children understand which group they belong to, then they strictly adhere to their choice of who and what to play with.

Children also ruthlessly exclude those outside their group. They are like new members of a select society: they themselves follow the rules in the strictest manner and vigilantly make sure that others follow them as well. Children will be very harsh about what girls and boys can and cannot do, and sometimes even deliberately neglect members of the opposite sex (my friend, a pediatric surgeon, once heard from her four-year-old son that “only boys can be doctors”). Then they are very surprised when they meet such specimens as female fighter pilots, auto mechanics and firefighters.

Until about seven years old, children are quite persistent in their beliefs about gender characteristics, and they are ready to dutifully follow the path that the navigator of the corresponding gender paved for them. Later, children accept exceptions to gender rules about who is superior to whom in a particular activity, but, as it turned out, and this cannot but worry, children's beliefs can simply “go underground”. […]

If anything characterizes the social cues of the twenty-first century for gender differences, it is the active emphasis on "pink for girls, blue for boys."

Moreover, the wave of pink is much more powerful. Clothes, toys, greeting cards, wrapping paper, party invitations, computers, phones, bedrooms, bicycles, whatever you name it, marketers have already painted it pink. The "pink problem", now burdened with the "princess" image, has been the subject of alarming discussion for about the last ten years.

Journalist and author Peggy Orenstein commented on this phenomenon in her book Cinderella Ate My Daughter: Messages from the Cutting Edge of a New Girl Girl Culture. She found more than 25,000 items in stores that were somehow related to the Disney Princess. 26

All efforts to level the playing field are in vain under the onslaught of pink waves. Mattel has released a "science" Barbie doll to stimulate girls' interest in science. And what can a Barbie Engineer build? Pink washing machine, pink revolving wardrobe, pink jewelry storage box. […]

As we know, the brain is a “deep learning” system, it seeks to get hold of the rules and avoids “prediction errors”. So, if a wearer with a newly acquired gender identity walks out into a world full of powerful pink messages that helpfully tell you what to do and what not, what can and cannot be worn, then it will be very difficult to change the route to disperse this pink wave.

Gina Rippon is professor of neuroimaging and a member of the editorial committee of the International Journal of Psychophysiology. Her book Gender Brain. Modern Neuroscience Debunks the Myth of the Female Brain,”published in August by Bombora, talks about the influence of social attitudes on our behavior and the“neuromuscular junk”that is used to validate entrenched stereotypes.