Are Gender Attitudes Fully Formed by Age 7

Another set of gender cognitions ... of basic descriptive gender stereotypes. As stated earlier, gender consistency is the third and final stage of gender constancy, which is usually attained between ages 5 and 7 (Slaby & Frey, 1975)....

Several (n = 7) longitudinal quantitative studies confirmed that gender attitudes change over time during the early adolescent period [59,65,81,130]. In three studies (two of which use the same dataset), gender attitudes were found to become less stereotypical with increasing age.

This study examines the development of gender role attitudes from early adolescence to emerging adulthood and investigates how the developmental trajectory is affected by sex, socioeconomic status, and cognitive abilities (intelligence). Four waves of the large-scale longitudinal German dataset BIJU between 1991 (grade 7; N = 3828, Mage = 13, SD = 0.61, 53.1% female, 96.4% German nationality), 1995 (grade 10, Mage = 17), 1997 (grade 12, Mage = 19) and 2001/2002 (university/career entry, Mage = 24) were used.

Researchers have found evidence ... through age 3); (2) rigidity (consolidation/schema confirmation) (roughly ages 3–6); and (3) flexibility (integration/schema development) (roughly ages 7–10) (Ruble, 1994)....

Consequently, educators in the UK (i.e., Commission on Gender Stereotypes in Early Childhood, 2020) and other countries (i.e., Norwegian Government's Gender Equality Action Plan, 2014) have been urged to challenge gender stereotypes early, to ensure that pupils' aspirations are not limited by traditional ideas about what girls and boys can do. Occupational stereotypes are formed early on. In a forced-choice task, Gettys and Cann (1981) asked 2.5 to 8 years olds to indicate whether a male or a female adult would be most likely to engage in 10 occupations, and found evidence of stereotyped perceptions of traditionally female and male occupations at all ages.

The data regarding children's preferences revealed that all children rejected gender-conforming peers of the opposite sex and gender-incongruent activities relative to the neutral options in Studies 2 and 3. Although exploratory, these findings raise the question of whether this avoidance orientation is accompanied by negative out-group attitudes (Martin & Ruble, 2010), which are predictive of behavioral expressions of prejudice (Halim et al., 2017). Such avoidance is likely one major way in which children self-socialize (Leaper, 2015), and the avoidance orientation suggests that children's gender-related social identity at this age is defined by what they are not more so than what they are.