Our children see women the same way we see them: this is the conclusion of a study published in Sex Roleswho discovered that as early as eight years old, children reflect our sexist views – not just the blatantly negative ones, but also the seemingly “positive” ones.
In psychology there are two types of sexism: the hostile one, in which women are clearly seen as inferior to men, and the benevolent one, a more subtle and insidious form of sexism often adopted by women themselves, which sees the female sex as delicate and in need of male protection. This second form of sexism is often hidden in phrases apparently in favor of women (typical of a couple of generations ago) such as “women don’t even touch each other with a flower” or “behind a great man there is always a great woman”.
A sexist alien plush toy
The researchers’ objective was to understand whether the sexist views of mothers and fathers coincided with those of their children: “In a broader perspective, we wanted to understand why gender gaps persist throughout the world, despite generations of women and men having fought for gender equality”, explain the authors to the scientific dissemination site PsyPost.
The research involved 175 New Zealand families, made up of a mother, father and an 8-year-old son or daughter. To understand what the children’s opinions were, the authors used Feppy, a stuffed animal who came “from far away” and made a series of statements about men and women. Some were a reflection of benevolent sexism, others of hostile sexism: the children had to say whether those sentences were “a little” or “completely” right or wrong.
On average, the children judged the hostile sentences to be “a bit wrong” and the benevolent ones to be “a bit right”, with similar responses between boys and girls, a sign that benevolent sexism is (from an early age) seen as overall correct.
Such a father…
The most interesting data emerges from the comparison with the parents. Fathers with higher levels of hostile sexism had sons and daughters who agreed more with hostile statements; similarly, mothers with benevolent sexist views had children who agreed more with benevolent ones. Fathers’ benevolent sexism, however, was not linked to their children’s opinions. Finally, the mothers’ hostile sexism was reflected in the opinions of their children, but only the sons.
The authors are not clear on the reason for this latter correspondence between the opinions of mothers and sons, but they hypothesize that it is because mothers with this type of belief raise boys and girls differently.
The goal, experts underline, is in no way to blame parents, but rather to realize how each of us plays a crucial role in reinforcing sexist beliefs. In the future, the research could extend to other categories of families – composed of a single parent, LGBTQ+ parents, and those belonging to other cultures.
