Mucky boys and girlie girls still rule

Traditional stereotypes of boys playing football and girls wearing princess dresses are as ingrained as ever, according to the latest research into Ireland’s nine-year-old population

IT’S DIFFERENT FOR GIRLS. And boys, for that matter. Research published this week showed that gender stereotyping is rife among Irish children. The finding came as a surprise to the co-director of the study, Sheila Greene, who is professor of childhood research at Trinity College Dublin. “I have to say I was surprised that the girls and boys interviewed for the study conformed so much to traditional stereotypes,” she says.

This latest qualitative research released from Growing Up In Ireland: The National Longitudinal Study of Childrenrevealed a group of 120 nine-year-olds who defined themselves sharply by gender. In general, the boys who were interviewed explained how other boys "played football and rugby" while girls "did ballet". One girl said boys are "really different. They play different sports, wear different clothes. They spend way too much time watching TV and on the computer and don't read books unless they are nerds." Boys described how girls liked "puppies and cute things", while boys liked "standing in a field". Only boys said they wanted to be chefs and soccer stars, and only girls wanted to be hairdressers and nurses.

The study indicates that girls and boys have well-established ideas about what is suitable behaviour for their sex, and that this starts well before the age of nine, “probably in the cradle”.

Biology is part of the picture, with boys being physically stronger than girls, but “biology does not explain a disposition to like pink and to be able to manage a Hoover. It doesn’t explain why boys see school as more for girls and why all boys seem to feel obliged to be fanatical about football.

“The study has everything from girls complaining that they were landed with housework to boys saying girls weren’t interested in sports,” she adds. “In some ways we think of this as a passé conversation, but when you consider that more girls than boys are obese and really need to be encouraged to take part in sports, it’s something we should be aware of. Some of the children referred to reading as being a girl thing; and with girls outperforming boys in education, this is also worrying.”

The main Growing Up In Ireland study, involving 8,500 nine-year-olds, shows lots of overlap between boys and girls in key aspects of development and in school achievement, but the differences emerge in the areas of attitudes, dress, activities and aspirations.

For the past eight years, Prof Greene’s daughter Helen O’Mahony has managed a creche in Dublin, and her experiences in childcare reflect the study findings. In recent years she has noticed the gender divide become more pronounced even in children as young as two and a half. She talks of situations where boys who pilfer princess dresses from the dressing-up box or who put clips in their hair are told off by girls for “doing the wrong thing”. She believes small children, especially girls, are “nearly brainwashed” by influences such as fashion and television, and by their elders.

“The girls now, even from as young as three, are trying so hard to be girlie, looking in the mirror and comparing skirts,” she says. “I see a lot of parents who want their young girls to look like princesses. They won’t send girls to Gaelic football because their hair and clothes might get dirty, and if a boy wants a doll as a toy or a girl wants an Action Man, they hate the thought of it. I believe boys and girls should be free to explore all of that – I think it’s healthy.”

According to Prof Mary Corcoran of the department of sociology at the National University of Ireland, Maynooth, it is difficult to avoid stereotyping because there are “so many codes around gender in our culture, beginning with blue for boys and pink for girls, that you would have to resist and challenge at every turn”. Prof Corcoran is not surprised by the gender roles articulated by the children in the study, pointing out that “most of them have just completed the ritual of holy Communion, a classically gendered event.” She adds that this gender stereotyping will be less defined as they grow older.

She doesn’t believe that any parents are interested in perpetuating stereotypes limiting the scope of either girls or boys, but says we live in a consumer culture that “represents the sexes in markedly different ways”. “In some respects, I think we have gone backwards in recent years. When I am collecting teenagers from a certain southside Dublin disco, the capacity of young girls to incapacitate themselves through footwear never ceases to amaze me. The boys bound out of the disco fully clothed, the girls shuffle out half naked and hunched over as they try to ambulate forward in gravity-defying heels. They make me think of the women in imperial China who had their feet bound to accentuate their feminity and daintiness”.

According to the parenting expert John Sharry, the big issue is around the rigidity of the child’s idea of their gender role. “The ideal is for them to feel happy in their gender, but not to feel oppressed or limited in how they perceive this. You don’t want a girl with natural sporting aptitude feeling that she can’t pursue this because she is a girl, or a boy avoiding study or reading because he perceives that this is what girls do.”

Although there is a certain inevitability to children defining themselves and each other through their gender, there are people in other countries determined to avoid this, including the controversial couples in Canada and Sweden who refused to reveal the gender of their children. A less extreme example is Egalia, a radical preschool set up in Sweden last year. At Egalia, teachers avoid using the words “his” or “hers”, the students are known as friends rather than boys and girls, and every book, toy and educational tool has been carefully chosen to avoid gender stereotyping. Genderless “emotion dolls” are even used to navigate conflicts between the children. “Society expects girls to be girlie, nice and pretty, and boys to be manly, rough and outgoing,” Jenny Johnsson, a teacher at the school, has said. “Egalia gives them a fantastic opportunity to be whoever they want to be.”

The “emotion dolls” were brought up this week at the launch of a report by Plan, the international children’s development organisation: Because I Am a Girl: The State of the World’s Girls. The CEO of Plan Ireland, David Dalton, says the report found greater gender equality “will help boys succeed in school, to be comfortable with their own identity, to be confident in expressing emotions and be equipped with the skills to build positive relationships of mutual trust and respect”.

In the Irish context genderless dolls in radical preschools may be a long way off, but Sharry believes it is important for parents to work at challenging perceptions of gender that might limit their children.

“This means not being rigid about gender stereotypes yourself. You should let your girls have the option of playing with toys or doing activities that are normally associated with boys and vice versa. Look carefully for their individual talents and interests, and don’t let their gender stop them exploring every aspect of themselves.”

Or, as Prof Sheila Greene puts it, “When stereotypes are given full rein, children’s choices and their freedom to be the person they want to be can be curtailed.”

growingup.ie