NARRATOR: Society tends to emphasize the differences between men and women, rather than the similarities. And it is those differences that are at the core of the gender socialization process that begins in very early childhood.
JANET SHIBLEY HYDE: By two years of age, most kids know whether they're a boy or a girl. And after that they quickly can identify that Daddy's also a boy, and Mommy's a girl, and what their brothers and sisters are, so they generalize that concept.
But it now turns out, even before they know that, that they're quite sensitive to gender cues. So babies, pre-verbal babies, before 12 months of age, will respond differently to men's voices, compared with women's voices, and to men's faces, compared with women's faces. They can tell the difference in those gender categories.
NARRATOR: But the gender socialization process does more than simply teach children to differentiate between males and females. It also teaches them about the meaning and significance of gender based differences.
SCOTT COLTRANE: Most of us were raised in families where men were waited on, for instance. So it's not as if we feel that housework shouldn't be shared, most men do. But they also feel entitled because their mother did it for them, or the housekeeper did it for them. If you grew up with a mother who did it all, you expect to marry somebody who's going to do it all. And beyond that, it becomes deeply ingrained in who we are and who we want to be.
IVY KENNELLY: If you are discouraged from doing particular things, as young girls often are, that's going to shape whether you think you should be doing those things. I mean it seems very elementary, but but somehow this gets by us. And the same really goes for boys. I mean, we expect really particular things from boys and from men, as well. And this shapes how you turn out.
NARRATOR: Nearly everyone agrees that gender awareness begins at a very early age. But there has been a longstanding debate over the precise mechanism by which children get their ideas about gender.
ALICE EAGLY: It's hard to evaluate newborns in most respects, because they're not very content terribly far along, nor in the sense of personality or other kinds of attributes. So a five-year-old has quite a capacity and personality that can be measured, but there's been a lot of environment, as well as the influence of innate characteristics. So we need sophisticated methods to investigate many aspects of what's inherited and what's the influence of the environment. So there's no simple answer.
NARRATOR: But that didn't stop one of America's leading weekly magazines from proclaiming that biology, not learned social interaction, plays the greatest role in the formation of attitudes about gender.
BARRIE THORNE: About every six years, they'll have a cover story with a heading like—I believe these are the exact words of one that was in 1980s—"Are girls and boys different? Yes, nature made them that way." And then the cover of this particular issue was a boy with a toy gun, and a natural posture, one thumb was in his is Levi belt. And then next to him is a girl in frilly clothes, cuddling up, and you think, nature made them that way?
ALICE EAGLY: The evolution of sex differences is a hot topic, these days, in psychology. The evolutionary psychologists promote a theory that there are, in fact, important inborn sex differences that arise from evolution. I have been promoting a different way of thinking about the characteristics, the psychological characteristics, of men and women.
In this theory, the most important influence is the roles that men and women have, to the extent those roles are different, that men women are differently distributed into roles in the society, they would develop a different psychology because they need the psychology that goes along with their life tasks. So for instance, if women have the responsibility of caring for young children and men don't to this society, then women would need to be nurturant, regardless of whether that was inborn, because the children have to survive.
And if men for instance, do warfare, then they have to develop more aggressive characteristics that would make them warriors, or soldiers.
NARRATOR: Attitudes about gender do more than affect the way people see themselves. They also play a role in the way people are seen by others.
SCOTT COLTRANE: My favorite studies are the baby studies where researchers, experimental researchers, take babies and dress them up as a boy or girl. It's the same baby in every case. So, let's say it's a boy baby. And in one set of experimental conditions, they dress up the boy baby and lacy pink, put a ball on his head. And then they parade the baby in front of strangers. And they say, well, what do you think about my baby?
And the responses to the pink, frilly, dressed boy baby are, she's so cute, she's quaint, she's delicate, she's soft. And if the same baby is dressed in bold colors with a linebacker jersey on, the observers are told it's a boy, or that he's tough, rough, aggressive. What a great guy he's going to be. In these cases, the baby is acting exactly the same way. Yet, people are attributing to that baby certain traits that we associate with gender.
NARRATOR: Over time, owing to social conditioning, as well as to the impact of biology, boys and girls begin to actually take on these gender related traits and incorporate them into their behavior.
BARRIE THORNE: For example, when I first started observing on playgrounds, school playgrounds, and I would see games of cooties, or girls chase the boys erupt right around me, and see how scripted it was, and how kids were, while drawing on cultural material that they had learned that's around all of us, they were also creating and recreating their own worlds of meaning.
I noticed that there were types of mixed gender encounters, where if you came into the encounter and watched what kids are doing, while girls and boys may be physically together, the way they've organized what they're doing, they're marking the difference, gender difference. So they're creating a sense of a gender divide through the variant way in which they're mixed in with one another.
Like, I watched a fourth grade boy teaching a kindergarten girl how to chase, how to play, girls chased the boys, by running backwards slowly and saying, that girls getting me, she's got cooties. It was a seduction in a way. He was teaching her how to play this game.