BBC on gender stereotypes through toys and clothing 😲

[lcakethereforeIam]

Came across this artifact on YouTube!

Wow.

It's brilliant isn't it! I've shown that clip to GCSE and A level classes before and it always kicked off fab discussions.

There's another one about mothers estimating whether their babies can crawl up a ramp or not, and the mothers of girls consistently underestimate what their daughters can do compared to mothers of boys. Incredible.

I remember when that came out! it was very useful in an ongoing family argument about whether or not it was ok that I bought our son a toy pushchair.

(He always gravitated towards them at toddler groups and his father and paternal grandfather were appalled that we’d buy him one. They did give their heads a wobble, in MN parlance)

Have you seen the series where they tried to eliminate gender bias in a primary school, OP? That one was fantastic, the teachers had no idea how differently they children by sex.

I don’t think I twigged the 3month brain remodelling before, though I’ve seen similar videos before.

Interesting interplay with gender dysphoria- contradictory.

My boys had dolls and pushchairs and played with my heeled shoes and handbags.

They still amazed me with their typical ‘boy’ pattern of pushing a brick along going ‘brum Brum’ if no car was available 🤣

I think there is an innate something as well. But that could just be my own bias seeing male and female behaviour in babies.

Thanks for posting this.

There's another thread on here about boys being stronger than their mothers which I commented on, because, apart from the serious points being made, I loved all the little windows into families play-fighting and arm-wrestling and generally speaking having lots of fun
I wanted to ask if they also did this play-fighting with their daughters because if they didn't, they were reinforcing stereotypes of boys=rough and tumble, girls=quieter play. I intended quoting this experiment about babies being treated differently depending on whether they were believed to be boy or girl, but I couldn't find it. Also it would have been a derail. Which I never ever do

These experiments about gender stereotyping go back decades, but it's like Groundhog Day, lots of people still maintain they don't treat their sons and daughters differently and they just somehow magically turn out boy-boy and girly-girl..
We know more about neuroplasticity now, so the mechanism of how gender stereotypes are absorbed right from babyhood is better understood.

That's really interesting!

Yes, it's your bias, girls do that sort of thing with bricks too.

It's impossible to tell if there's any innate difference between boys and girls behaviours because there's no statistically meaningful sample being raised in a truly neutral way. There might be a sexed difference (on a population) when they're older on something like tendency to look before they leap vs leaping without even thinking of looking but we've no way of disentangling nature vs nurture.

Because I watched the BBC thing, YouTube is now offering me similar stuff about child development. It surprised me that I'm actually fearful about watching some of this stuff. It's only a few years old, a small section of society was recognising gender stereotypes for the nonsense they were. At the same time a bigger part of the great and good were well on the way to further entrenching them. It should all have been so different. No wonder it makes me sad.

That was such a great series, I watched it at the time. There’s another bit which stayed with me where they analysed how teachers related to boys and girls (pretty much the same stuff as those volunteers) and then got pre-pubescent girls and boys to compete in a physical activity . The boy who was beaten by a girl on strength fell apart. It was quite disturbing to consider why. Then they explained (which I didn’t know then) that pre-puberty strength / speed is basically a matter of physical size. It’s only after puberty that boys are stronger.

Well it starts before babies are even born needing to find out in pregnancy then how many parents comment on why they want a certain sex then when it comes to buying for their own child or presents for others and clothes? It starts at home

@MarieDeGournay I do arm wrestle with my daughter. I still catch myself telling her to be careful occasionally (clambering over rocks in a river) and force myself to stop. I've tried to give her as much access to all types of toys. She loved trains, hated prams and dolls. We went through a difficult time after she started school saying girls do this, boys do that but thankfully I've good solid female examples doing traditional male jobs in the family.

In a thousand little ways society puts expectations on boys and girls, its a constant drip drip effect and the girls toys v boys toys is just a part of it.

@ErrolTheDragon the girls I knew were making the bricks talk to each other, while the boys were using them as cars or banging tools.

But of course they were all brought up by people so impossible to know, as you say.

TW.
I’m about to use the word affirming, despite my current dislike of it! 🤣

I always quietly affirmed children choosing the ‘other’ toy, but of course that could have just emphasised it being unconventional and put them off.

It’s not a winners game, this.

I'm not sure they do as much as boys TBH. Boys do tend to be attracted to vehicles of one type or other....whether it be trains, tractors, buses, fire engines, rockets.....in a way I don't really observe with girls. I had two boys and a girl ( all now adult) and now a granddaughter. I also used to teach.

I used to like playing with bricks and blocks as a child, but would end up building houses or towns with them.

I post on one other forum - an urbanism and architecture forum.....and the one section that leaves me totally non -plussed is the transport section......but almost without fail the men, and men make up 99% of the forum, all seem to have a real interest and knowledge in transport systems.

Though there was another woman once, and she was really into rapid transit systems, to the extent that she designed a whole new underground metro network for the city we all live in ( for her own amusement) She is autistic.

This is great - there's been all those double-blind studies of adult-child and adult-infant interaction very much along those lines for decades, but this clip actually visualizes the outcome. Saved into my YouTube library!

"Babies" aren't a blank slate either - there's plenty of studies of adult interaction with newborns similar to the setup in this clip, and the adults would unfailingly behave differently depending on what sex they were told the child had (much more verbalising with assumed girls, for instance.) So adult bias, including your own, is already baked into baby behaviour and the formation of their brains.

I've seen quite a few children around who have been, or who were clearly in the process of being, transed by their parents. One included an obvious boy of around five years of age. My granddaughter at that age, and still does, liked to climb - and she used to love the monkey bars at the park.

I'm used to seeing all kinds of swinging and traversing styles when observing children, both boys and girls, on the bars. This particular child was presented in 'girls' clothing' and with a 'girly' hairstyle but was conspicuously male ( even obviously ). The child's movement across the bars was muscular in a way I'd not seen even in a particularly athletic girl of that age before.

My husband and I watched and just said " that's a boy". The way he walked even, the way he held his body was just very male. I was surprised that even at this age there could be such an obvious delineation of masculinity. But there was. He was at the park with his Mum and two sisters.

@MarieDeGournay that's interesting, because my girls (who are now teens and twenties) still play-fight! Very risk-taking dad who encouraged being physically daring, so wonder if it is that. I hated it at the time, now it seems quite sensible.

. Shortshriftandlethal i post on one other forum - an urbanism and architecture forum.....and the one section that leaves me totally non -plussed is the transport section......but almost without fail the men, and men make up 99% of the forum, all seem to have a real interest and knowledge in transport systems.

Who gets the train sets? or the 21st century equivalents, as train sets are no longer for children these days.

Men make up 99% at least of model railway enthusiasts and I've heard it suggested that the men who design transport systems are just grown-up boys playing with train sets, but on a giant scale.
Discuss in no more that 2,500 words Your answer should making reference to real-life cases such as HS2😄

If you pigeonhole your children they can't learn to fly. In this age of subjective reality I should add that I mean that metaphorically.

😁one of the irritating things about my upbringing was being taught that women ran the home but they weren't supposed to be 'bossy'.

Now that is social conditioning. Admittedly ideal management is by consent not coercion, but I don't remember my brother's having such caveats.

I thought I had a boy that loved pets in the way I’ve seen girls obsess (including myself). It turned out to be about the habitats. He loved houses/cages/tanks of all kinds and wasn’t that interested in their occupants.

I thought he’d be an architect, but no. It’s now all about the numbers.

My DD’s favourite toys were her brio trains, building blocks, shape sorters/ puzzles and her cow trike. She did have a buggy toy but only after joining reception and it was only in favour for a few months.

The one time I did go into gendered stuff was in an attempt to help twins separate.
They got a tub of same but different toys to help them along. With hindsight I’d have changed the colour of the two tubs the toys were in into less obvious boy/girl.