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SEX AND gender are terms often used interchangeably. But sex more properly
refers to biological differences of male and female; gender refers to society’s
construction of a system which identifies what is masculine and feminine.
Individuals incorporate this system to develop their gender identities.
Despite considerable research on gender issues in secondary and junior schools,
few people have studied how gender develops in infant school, which children
in Britain start when they are four to five years old. This may reflect
a belief in the sexual innocence of children, but there are also ideological
and conceptual reasons for this lack. Adults, parents and teachers often
view sex and gender as natural and unproblematic; ‘boys will be boys’ and
‘girls will be girls’ are typical expressions.

More than 80 years ago, Sigmund Freud rejected the tradition that held
sexuality to be biologically determined. He challenged the view that the
sexual identity of a child inevitably ‘unfolds’ in one direction or another.
Freud proposed instead that children construct a psychosexual identity from
a bisexual potential through their experiences in the family. Despite enduring
controversy about the nature of psychosexual development, psychologists
accepted Freud’s views on the importance of experience in childhood. They
also accepted his chronology, which postulated that the oedipal complex
was resolved between five and six years of age. Thus social learning theorists
used to believe that gender differences in the behaviour of children under
four years old were unstable, and cognitive developmentalists argued that
a stable sense of gender identity emerged only at about five years.

The past 20 years have seen a dramatic change in the professional view
of the development of gender identity; researchers now examine the behaviour
of toddlers for signs of gender differences. As soon as children utter their
first words, investigators listen for evidence of gender marking. Even the
play of children in their second year has been scrutinised for evidence
that toy preferences, patterns of activity, and sensual pleasure-seeking
are marked by gender.

One of our observations, collected as part of a study of the construction
of gender identities during children’s first year at school, illustrates
the sophisticated understanding of four-year-old children. Notable too is
the attention teachers give to children’s developing sense of gender identity.

Jonathan selects a pink-orange nylon nightie from the dressing-up rack
and succeeds, after considerable difficulty, in getting it on. He then struggles
to put a small white satin tutu on top of it. Neither the other children
nor the teacher pay attention. Eventually a girl in the class comes up and
says: ‘It’s not for you, Jonathan.’ Jonathan looks bemused but carries on
trying to squeeze himself into the tutu. After concerted effort and failure
he takes the tutu to the teacher and asks her to help him. She exclaims:
‘Jonathan, that is the smallest dress we have, you won’t fit into it. Let’s
go and look for something else.’ Jonathan chooses a skirt and the teacher
helps him put it on. While saying ‘that’s nice’ she also encourages him
to put on a waistcoat from a man’s three-piece suit.

Each of the actors in this drama has a set of rules about the construction
of a gender identity. The girl sees Jonathan’s behaviour as a violation
of a principle of gender identity which defines some garments as appropriate
to females but inappropriate for males. The teacher is more flexible, allowing
Jonathan to wear female clothes but urging him to don a garment appropriate
to his gender as well. But this brief episode is silent on Jonathan’s beliefs
about his gender identity. He may be unaware of the gender marking of the
nightie and tutu, but this is unlikely given his bemused air when tackled
by a classmate. He may knowingly be violating a rule against cross dressing.

Through the analysis of such episodes, and my earlier research on gender
knowledge in children as young as 18 months, I am trying to understand the
earliest attempts of young children to construct gender identities.

Among psychologists some theorists, including Eleanor Maccoby and Carol
Jacklin, explicitly use the terms sex and gender interchangeably. In my
work, both with John Archer and with Gerard Duveen, I have been careful
to separate them. Such precise specification avoids ‘naturalising’ gender
differences: avoids, that is, assuming that patterns of action, feeling
and behaviour that are confined to one gender are biologically determined.

At birth, doctors and parents use biological characteristics to determine
an infant’s sex. This categorisation into male and female is binary and
ultimately derives from roles in sexual reproduction. The same characteristics
are critical in assigning an infant membership in one of the two social
categories we call gender. So important is the assignment of gender that
in the rare cases where a baby’s external genitalia are ambiguous, clinicians
may analyse the infant’s chromosomes to determine the genetic sex of the
new recruit to society. Once membership in a sex category is determined,
infants automatically become members of the congruent gender group and their
lives are ordered by the set of rules which describe femininity and masculinity.
These prescribe many aspects of the infant’s life – name, dress, mode of
handling and social expectations about action, feeling and behaviour.

In our analysis of the early development of gender, Gerard Duveen and
I have suggested that the dimorphic biological characteristics related to
sex function as signs for the construction of a social gender identity.
We have invoked Serge Moscovici’s theory of social representations to describe
the unique rules or code a society constructs to regulate and communicate
knowledge about gender and the relations between members of gender groups.
Infants gain access to social representations of gender through their interaction
with informed members of society. Their relations with parents, siblings
and other adults and children are ordered by these representations. As children
internalise social representations of gender, they can use them to assert
and express social gender identities.

Unlike the binary characteristics of biological sex, the traits that
define gender are often not binary; their distributions overlap between
the sexes, and are much more complex. While a model deriving from sexual
reproduction shapes the categories of female and male, heterosexuality does
not constrain our use of the words masculinity and femininity. The choice
of a sexual partner varies within the gender categories of woman and man.
Although social life is not obviously suffused with gender regulation, the
importance of gender in the construction of social life should not be underestimated
nor its meaning in modern societies ignored.

Perhaps the most significant aspect of the social order imposed by social
representations of gender is the hierarchical nature of the relations between
gender groups. In education, politics or economics, group relations are
structured by the power and prestige that marks masculinity. In my account
of gender-marked play and of social interaction in school, it will become
clear that this hierarchical structure influences children’s interaction
from an early age.

The dressing-up episode illustrated that by the time children enter
school, they have internalised social representations of gender which enable
them both to comprehend and produce signs of gender in their interaction
with other children and adults. In exploring the roots of this internalisation,
my colleagues and I have observed and interviewed children from 18 months
to 4 years of age.

In two studies, we analysed videotape recordings of pairs of children
at play in a room supplied with toys which parents had identified as feminine
and masculine, that is, appropriate for girls and boys of this age. We found
that pairs of boys spend more time playing with masculine toys than feminine
toys but that pairs of girls displayed no consistent gender-marked preference,
although they spent significantly less time playing with masculine toys
than the boys. These differences became clearer after 2.5 years.

We concluded that even at this early age, girls and boys use toys differently.
Boys avoid feminine toys and employ masculine toys to mark their membership
on a gender category, while girls do not use toys to mark their gender identities.
A further analysis of the congruence/incongruence between a child’s gender
category and choice of toys provided additional support for this view. Both
girls and boys made more choices incongruent with their gender when playing
in girl/boy pairs than in single gender pairs. But it was only boys who
consistently chose more congruent than incongruent toys, whether with other
boys or in mixed settings. Boys consistentlyasserted a masculine gender
identity. But neithersetting prompted girls to engage primarily in femininemarked
activity.

We also interviewed the children we had observed, to assess their capacities
to comprehend and communicate knowledge of gender in different ways. We
asked them to identify pictures of women and men, girls and boys with gender-marked
words which we supplied. We also asked them to provide the appropriate words
to describe the photographs. We asked them to sort the pictures of adults
and children according to gender and to sort photographs of the playroom
toys into gender-appropriate categories.

As expected, performance improved with age; children found it easier
to identify the pictures than to produce the correct words; and photographs
of people were easier to sort than those of toys. The under 2s could successfully
identify people’s gender 60 per cent of the time, but even children in their
fourth year found it difficult to sort toys by gender. By and large, the
performance of girls and boys was very similar and allowed us to conclude
that both begin to internalise the social representation of gender at a
very early age.

The similarity in girls’ and boys’ knowledge of the symbols of the gender
system is in sharp contrast to their active expression of gender identities.
The intellectual similarity makes it unlikely that girls lack the resources
to assert their own social gender identity. One way to describe the styles
of play of girls and boys is to say that boys assert an exclusive masculine
identity while girls reject a narrow and exclusive definition of their femininity.
As a result, gender does not appear to define how girls play. We know that
girls have internalised the gender-marking of toys because they are as successful
as boys at the toy sorting task. So can their undifferentiated choice of
toy in play be linked to a resistance to femininity as it is defined in
current social representations of gender? Boys may be keen to claim their
masculinity, while girls may be unwilling to be restricted by their femininity.
Prestige and power accrues to masculinity. Perhaps even these very young
children have internalised the values that are part of our gender system.

There is little doubt that children starting school have already developed
feminine and masculine gender identities. Gerard Duveen and I have recently
investigated the impact of school on these identities. Systematic observations
and interviews were only undertaken after we had spent a year becoming familiar
with reception classes in two schools. One school, sited in a predominantly
middle-class area, had three classes for the new intake, structured by age.
We worked with the youngest children, those who, in line with county regulations,
had recently become four years old. In the first two terms they attended
school only half the day. The other school, in an older working-class part
of town, had a single reception class with children ranging in age from
four to five years. These children attended school full-time only in the
term in which they became five.

From systematic observations of individual children, we collected information
on their companions, activities,material objects and degree to which the
teacher regulatedthem. Boys spent more time in all-boy company and when
inmixed company, in groups which were made up primarilyof boys. These groups
were larger than those in which weobserved girls. Although girls spent much
time in all-girlgroups, they appeared more often than boys in mixed groups,
either in groups predominantly composed of other girls or in evenly mixed
groups. By their third term, girls were participating in larger groups,
much as the boys did.

To assess the influence of the teacher on the children’s play we compared
the composition of children’s groups when their activity was organised by
the teacher and by themselves. Across the school year, the influence of
the teachers reduced the participation of both girls and boys in single-gender
groups. But boys, even in the summer term, asserted a masculine identity
through their participation in single gender and groups where boys formed
the majority. Although boys took part more in mixed groups when the teacher
organised the activity, girls still spent more time in predominantly boy
groups than boys in groups where girls predominated.

Analyses also showed that girls and boys use space and materials differently.
Boys, whether in all-boy groups, in predominantly boy groups, or on their
own, use the open spaces in the classroom more often than do groups of girls.
Girls spread their use of space more evenly throughout the classroom. Boys’
use of space is more focused than that of girls; we found no spatial zone
in the classroom used more frequently by all-girl groups.

A similar pattern emerges from the analyses of activity with objects.
We grouped objects in terms of their potential for creative play, role play,
directed play and construction play. Construction play involved the use
of large bricks, toy cars, Lego, train sets and the like, and it was the
primary focus of boys’ activity – although this was less so when the activity
was organised by the teacher. Girls divided their time more evenly among
the various options, so they spent more time than boys in creative play
with materials such water, sand, and play dough, role play with food, pram,
telephone, cooker and clothes, and also in directed play using paint, number
work, writing, reading schemes and the like.

Toys for the boys

When we discussed our findings with teachers, they commented that girls
were not always able to gain access to the bricks, cars and train sets available
in the classroom. Talk about intervening to ensure that girls had access
to construction play led teachers to wonder whether it violated their commitment
to antisexism. It was not clear whether commitment to an antisexist ideal
or unease at challenging masculine power led to their hesitation.

To assess what children know about gender in their use of language,
toys and behaviour, we interviewed them in the autumn and again in the summer
term. Utterances that adults attribute stereotypically to men and women,
such as ‘Damn it, it’s broken’ or ‘Oh, what a lovely picture’ were presented
embedded in a story format. Although adults would attribute 4 of the 16
items to men and the rest to women, the children were eager to claim the
utterances for their own gender group. Girls attributed more of the utterances
to the girl in the story while boys assigned more to the boy. The strategies
of girls and boys were similar in this formal respect, and there was no
straightforward gender difference in performance. Girls and boys assigned
few items consistently according to adult gender stereotypes. Only the two
instances of ‘blast it’ were attributed correctly to the boy in both terms;
the two uses of ‘sweet’ were assigned to the girl in the autumn and one
instance of ‘Look at me’ to the boy in the summer.

The children adopted a similar strategy of assigning things to their
own gender group when we asked them to choose photographs of items from
their own classroom for a girl and a boy. In both terms, girls assigned
more of the items to the girl. Similarly, boys assigned more of the items
to the boy, and this effect was stronger for boys in the summer term. Few
items were consistently gender marked by both girls and boys, though a photograph
of a doll was an exception. Boys appeared to avoid assigning these consensually
feminine objects to the boy. Girls, on the other hand, claimed the large
bricks and the Lego, lending support to teachers’ concerns about girls’
access to them in the face of the boys’ forceful and seemingly legitimate
claims.

Clearer evidence of gender marking appeared when we asked children to
indicate which picture was the odd one out in a set of three drawings, each
of a child with a toy that matched or failed to match her own gender. Both
girls and boys were more likely to choose a picture of a boy playing with
a ‘girl’s’ toy, and when one boy appeared with two girls he was more likely
to be selected as odd than one girl with two boys. Girls and boys share
a common set of social representations in which masculinity is salient and
associated with exclusivity.

Children also agreed on how to assign objects, activities and behaviourial
traits to girl and boy characters. To a limited extent, they did this in
accordance with social representations of gender, although in each gender
group the most consistent assignments related to their own gender. Boys
assigned a photograph of dolls and teddies to girls, but girls themselves
were not consistent when assigning objects to children according to gender.
Girls chose a girl as the character in a story who was pushed and hurt,
while boys chose a boy character to mend the phone. Girls but not boys chose
a girl character to be afraid, while boys claimed a boy to shout and be
brave. On this task, girls and boys claimed distinct gender identities.

There is little doubt that children enter school with structured gender
identities and an allegiance to their own gender group. Evidence of the
influence of the teacher indicates that there is some flexibility in children’s
commitment to social representations of gender and that school can provide
an arena within which rigid conformity may be tempered. Our discussions
with teachers revealed a genuine desire to provide greater scope for girls
and boys to gain access to experience unfettered by conventional gender
restrictions. Despite this, the rigidity with which older children adhere
to gender prescriptions has led theorists such as John Archer to suggest
that girls and boys inhabit different social worlds and follow distinct
developmental pathways. I believe that this deep separation of femininity
and masculinity reflects the naturalisation of gender and a conceptual collapse
of the distinction between sex and gender.

Again, an episode from one school illustrates the argument. In the discussion
mentioned earlier about girls’ and boys’ use of construction toys, the head
teacher suggested that it was natural for boys to be more active, stronger
and hence to require more space. Citing my research with Caroline Smith
which showed that the same six-month-old infant was encouraged by mothers
to be active when presented as a boy, but soothed and contained when presented
as a girl, I suggested that adults’ expectations might influence the way
infants and young children experience activity and space.

The evidence was greeted with surprise and pleasure. Without intending
to do so, these teachers had naturalised the social gender identities which
their reception class children brought to school. Their own unexamined expectations
based on hypotheses about biologically determined characteristics would
be a brake on any change they might wish to affect. As John Stuart Mill
said more than a hundred years ago: ‘I deny that anyone knows, or can know,
the nature of the two sexes, as long as they have only been seen in the
present relationto one another.’

Dr Barbara Lloyd is reader in psychology at the University of Sussex.
She is the author of Sex and Gender, with John Archer, Cambridge University
Press, 1985, and the forthcoming Gender Identities and Education (Harvester-Wheatsheaf)
with Gerard Duveen. Her research is funded by the Economic and Social Research
Council in Britain and the Spencer Foundation of Chicago, Illinois.