Even Preschoolers Associate Positions Of Power With Being A Man

By Emily Reynolds An imbalance in power — personal and political — is at the heart of many of the conversations we have around gender. #MeToo sparked a global conversation on the topic, and issues around the gender pay gap and women in leadership roles also deal with matters of unequal power. But our assumptions about how gender and power interact may start far before we even reach the workplace, new research suggests. In a paper published in Sex Roles, Rawan Charafeddine from the CNRS in Paris and colleagues conclude that associations between power and masculinity start when we’re barely out of nappies, with children as young as four making the link. We already know that children internalise gendered hierarchies from a young age: one 2010 study, for example, found that children rate traditionally masculine jobs as more valuable. But researchers hadn’t studied how children assess the relative power of men and women, or what they believe about the way power dynamics affect relationships between genders. Charafeddine’s team asked 148 French preschoolers to look at an image featuring two non-gendered individuals, one adopting a dominant physical posture and one adopting a submissive or subordinate posture. The children were told that one character was saying “you have to do everything I say!” and one “Ok! I will do what you want!”. They were then asked which character had power and which did not. In the second part of the study, the children were told that...
Source: BPS RESEARCH DIGEST - Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Tags: Developmental Gender Social Source Type: blogs