Development of a category of gender

Psychological essentialism is a mode of category representation in which membership of a category requires an underlying and unchanging reality, in other words, an essence (Gelman et al. 1994; Prentice and Miller, 2007). Recent studies with adult participants show that categories that can be observed by relatively stable physical qualities, such as categories of race, ethnicity, and physical disability are more strongly essentialized than categories associated with social class, appearance, or interests (Haslam et al., 2000). According to Haslam et al. (2000), among all the categories that are used to categorize people, including age, race, and intelligence, the categorical domain that is the highest in essentialism is gender. Although gender may be the most essentialized category compared to other categories, research suggests that the categorization of gender follows a reverse U-shaped developmental path, changing from a not essentialist to highly essentialist understanding, and then going back to a less essentialist understanding.

At the beginning of the development of a category of gender, there does not appear to be an essentialist view. Children between the ages of 2 and 3 believe that a person’s sex can change by changing external features such as clothing and hairstyle (Siegler & Alibali, 2005). They do not see sex as a permanent feature and believe that one can change their sex if they want to change it. Even though this pattern of categorization does not imply anything about whether young children perceive gender as a social or biological category, it implies that young children do not see gender as a category determined by essence.

Gender as a category of essence seems to appear by the age of 4, when children start to attribute gender differences to underlying and unchanging biological sex differences. A study by Taylor (1996) demonstrates this tendency toward essentialism and how it changes with age. In this study, 4 to 10 year-old children and adults were presented a story in which a baby was raised on an island with only members of the opposite sex (e.g. a girl raised by men) or with only members of the same sex (e.g. a girl raised by women). Then, they were asked what properties that character would have at age 10. At all ages, participants in the same-sex island condition said the character would acquire same-sex properties. However, in the opposite-sex condition, children up to age 10 based their responses significantly more on gender category rather than the effects of the environment. For example, they said a baby girl would acquire feminine properties even though she was raised by men. In contrast, 10-year-old children and adults responded that a baby girl would acquire more masculine properties when raised by men. This study suggests that on average, children up to 10-years-old see gender as a category of essence, and after 10-years-old, gender is perceived more as a social category that can be influenced by environment.

In a world where adults do not have a consensus on how much of gender as a category can be attributed to social factors or biological qualities, it is surprising to see the consensus among children about seeing gender as an essential category up to a certain age. Research on the domain-specifity of categorization processes of children may shed light to both why children follow such a U-shaped development and why the end of this U-shape only reaches to the point which makes gender the category domain that is the highest in essentialism among adults.