8.3a Gender Socialization

Gender socialization refers to the process by which people learn the expectations of behavior and attitudes associated with one’s gender. Due to prenatal testing, children are often gendered before birth. Therefore, the foundation of their gender socialization begins even before they are born. For example, parents may decorate their child’s bedroom using themes and colors related to the child’s sex category, like sports for boys and princesses for girls. Gender is the primary lens through which parents make decisions about toys and clothing for their child, the activities in which their child takes part, and their overall expectations about their child’s behavior (Gansen & Martin, 2018). Moreover, parents make decisions about the gender socialization of their children in a cultural context that includes the threat of legal sanctions for raising a gender-nonconforming child (Meadow, 2018).

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Gender Socialization Occurs Through Nursery Décor

Beautiful interior of baby room… [Photograph]. pixelshot via Canva Pro.

Gender socialization also occurs in unexpected settings. Garner and Grazian (2016) conducted 100 hours of public observation of visitors at a U.S. zoo. They did not set out to focus on gender socialization but quickly saw it as an activity that often occurred among zoo visitors with children. For example, parents used cultural narratives about gender in humans to describe physical sex differences they saw between zoo animals:

[A] mother pointed out a wandering peahen and peacock. ‘That’s the female and that’s the male,’ she said. Her daughter was not so sure, and asked, ‘That’s the boy? And that’s the girl? I don’t think so.’ The woman explained, ‘No, I’m sure. The males are the pretty, bright ones, and the females are the plain ones. You would think the pretty one would be the female, but it isn’t.’ (Garner & Grazian, 2016, p. 187).

Through conversations about zoo animals, parents conveyed expectations of appearance associated with humans. Such interactions can leave children with the message that their culture expects girls to be pretty and boys to be plain. The fact that contradictory patterns appear among non-human animals does not necessarily disrupt expectations for people or open the door to alternative presentations of gender among humans.

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Parents Engage in Gender Socialization of Children at Zoos

A family looking at the peacock… [Photograph]. Zinkevych from Getty Images via Canva Pro.