Gender Schema Theory Essay

Martin and Halverson suggested an alternative to the cognitive-developmental approach proposed by Kohlberg and addressed it the grammatical grammatical grammatical sexual activity schema possible action. In Kohlbergs theory, children must reach gender consistency in the lead they are able to begin imitating the conduct of resembling sex role models.In gender schema theory the early on gender identity acquired at roughly the age of three is the starting point to which children will accordingly begin to give ear for schemas, schemas are packages of organised clutters of education astir(predicate) gender- abstract deportment and children learn these schemas by interacting with people, such as learning which rooks to make with, which array to wear etc. and these service of process children to chip in sense of the world around them and help children to organise their experiences and process new information and withal to help self-evaluate themselves, this is to help t hem tone of voice good ab reveal themselves.Support for the gender schema theory was conducted by Martin et al 1995 who manifested toys to children aged four to five. Children were informed, before choosing a toy to con with that it was either a misss toy or a boys toy, they were then asked whether they and different boys or girls would like to play with the toys. They found that if a toy, such as a magnet, was given the label of macrocosm a boys toy then entirely boys would play with it.However if boys were told that it was a girl toy then they didnt unavoidableness to play with it. Similarly girls would non play with toys labelled for boys. The label given at the start unever-changingly affected the childrens toy preference. It is an important finding in that it highlights the labelling and the categorisation of objects that children are subjected to from a spring chicken age, and how their toys can be labelled in the same way as appropriate gender behaviour.A limitatio n of this question is that an observation of the children and although it has high ecological asperity as it is in a legitimate life setting, the children may fetch shown take in characteristics as the toys were stereotype for their gender it is problematical if they had guessed the aim of the research and the results may affirm been due to the children trying to please the detective as they may have feeling they would get punished for choosing the wrong gendered toy to play with and how much of the childrens superior was due to free-will.It was besides done in a controlled environment which means that the findings cannot be generalised asideside of the research setting. Bauer 1993 cherished to investigate this further and set out to study the way in which children call upon gender schemas when processing information. Pre-school-age and older children have been found to process gender consistent and gender inappropriate information otherwise so Bauer wanted to ass imilate if this was the expression in very young children as well.Bauer devised a way to test girls and boys as young as xxv months of age. Children discovered the experimenter carry out short sequences of stereotypically fe manly, male or gender neutral activities, for example, changing a nappy, shaving a shimmy bear or going on a treasure hunt. She tested children by elicited imitation both nowadays after and 24 hours later to see if they would copy what they had seen.Bauer found that girls showed equivalent note of echo for all three types of sequence, boys on the other hand showed superior take back of male stereotyped activities, meaning they would not imitate any female behaviour and their recall for gender neutral activities was the same as for male stereotyped activities. These results destine that boys more than girls tend to make go for of gender schemas by the age of twenty-five months and boys appear to remember more accurately event sequences consistent with th eir own gender, whereas girls show no difference in recall of gender consistent and gender inconsistent information.A limitation of this research is that it could be due to boys being more presumable to be penalised by their parents, especially their fathers for carrying out female stereotyped activities, so the children may have played with the male stereotyped toys even if they wanted to play with the other female stereotyped toys.The findings may also be down to that Bauer, who modelled the sequences, is female and the boys may have felt uncomfortable in copying her behaviour. Gender schema theory is parsimonious as it tries to explain gender through cognitive development and does not take into consideration biological gender differences, such as chromosomes, genes or hormones. It is also alpha-bias as it exaggerates the differences between men and women.