5 To 6-Year-Old Children’s Gender Stereotypes About Intelligence-Kindness And Mathematics-Language

Gender stereotype refers to people’s fixed beliefs and views on the gender roles and behaviors of men and women.Competence and enthusiasm are the main content of gender stereotypes.In terms of the general characteristics of competence and enthusiasm,it is generally believed in adult gender stereotypes that men are more intelligent than women and women are more kind than men,that is,"intelligence=men" and "kindness=women".At the same time,in terms of specific domain traits of competence and enthusiasm,gender stereotypes of adults also hold that "math=male" and "reading=female".Studies have shown that the formation of these gender stereotypes first occurs when children are 5 to 6 years old.However,the following questions remain to be answered in previous studies on the formation of gender stereotype contents in children:1)does the age of gender stereotype formation in children about competence and enthusiasm have cross-cultural consistency?2)is there a relationship between children’s gender stereotypes about general competence traits and domain-specific competence?3)will the specificity of background knowledge provided by the environment(story context and trait context)affect the formation of gender stereotypes in children?This study answered the above research questions through two experiments.Experiment 1 examined gender stereotypes about "intelligence and kindness" in 121 Chinese children aged 5 to 6 using both story context and trait context.The results:(1)Chinese boys and girls began to agree that "intelligence=boys" at the age of 5,and all the children did not have the stereotype of "kind=female".Both boys and girls preferred to be "kind" in nature.(2)in the story context,the 5-year-old children identified as "intelligence=male";in the trait context,the 6-year-old children identified as "intelligence=male";The fitting degree of the story situation model was better than that of the trait situation,and the gender effect of the "intelligence" trait reasoning was more significant in the story situation.In experiment 2,the gender stereotypes of "math and reading" and the relationship between intelligence and math gender stereotypes of Chinese children aged 5 to 6 were investigated by using story scenarios.The results:(1)Chinese children have formed the stereotype of "math=male" at the age of 6;At age 6,the stereotype of "reading=female" was formed;(2)partial correlation analysis between gender-based "intelligence" score and gender-based "math" ability score of 5-6 years old children found that only the gender-based "intelligence" score of trait context children was significantly correlated with gender-based "math" score,while the story context was not.The above results suggest that children have formed gender stereotypes similar to adults at the age of 5-6,which will affect children’s future development.Based on the above results,gender stereotype intervention can be conducted on children in early childhood based on specific clues,starting from the beliefs and behaviors of parents and teachers.