What’s in a label? It’s different for boys vs. girls, new study of parents finds

(Press-News.org) A decades-old riddle poses the following scenario: A boy is injured in a car crash in which the father dies and is taken to the emergency room, where the doctor says, “I cannot operate on him—he’s my son.” Who, then, is the doctor? Many over the years have been stumped in not recognizing the answer: the mother. 

Similarly, research has shown that adults instinctively think of men when asked to think of a person—they describe the most “typical” person they can imagine as male and assume storybook characters without a specified gender are men. A new study by psychology researchers shows that the way parents talk to their children may contribute to these perceptions.

Their findings, reported in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, show that parents across the US are more likely to use gender-neutral labels—for instance, “kid”—more often for boys than for girls and to use gender-specific labels, such as “girl,” more often for girls than for boys. 

“While perceptions of gender are driven by a variety of factors, our research identifies one of the social influences that may contribute to our tendency to equate men with people in general and points to potential ways to address this bias,” says Rachel Leshin, the paper’s lead author, a New York University doctoral student at the time of the study and now a postdoctoral research fellow at Princeton University. 

The tendency to view men as default “people” is also reflected in our collective reality: Internet searches for “people” yield more images of men than women, and men remain overrepresented in a host of fields, including politics, media, and medicine. 

“This bias has important consequences for issues of gender equity, as perceiving men as the ‘default’ has the potential to elevate their concerns, priorities, and values above those of others,” explains Leshin. “Understanding the specific factors that may lay the foundation for these male defaults is one way to start thinking about how to intervene on this bias.”

To explore this matter, Leshin and her colleagues conducted experiments involving more than 800 parent-children pairs, with mothers making up more than 90 percent of the parental participants. In one, which included more than 600 parents of children aged 4 to 10 from across the US, parents were shown photographs of individual children playing on a playground—both boys and girls—and asked to come up with a caption that they then read aloud to their children. 

In this experiment, parents were more likely to use gender-neutral labels (e.g., “The kid is sliding”) when describing boys relative to girls. Conversely, parents were more likely to use gender-specific labels (e.g., “This girl is swinging”) when describing girls relative to boys.

The researchers were also interested in knowing whether the results of the first study would extend to both stereotypical and counter-stereotypical depictions of children, so they conducted a second study. 

In this one, which included nearly 200 parent-child pairs, primarily from the US, parents participated in a virtual picture-book-reading task designed to elicit open-ended discussion of gender-related themes. The picture book consisted of pages depicting a character engaged in a distinct gendered behavior—for example, digging for worms (stereotypical of boys) or painting fingernails (stereotypical of girls). Across the various pages, boys and girls were depicted as engaging in stereotypical gendered behaviors (e.g., a boy digging for worms) and counter-stereotypical behaviors (e.g., a girl digging for worms). 

Consistent with the first experiment, the parents used more gender-neutral labels when discussing boys engaged in stereotypical behavior (e.g., a boy digging for worms) than they did for girls engaged in stereotypical behavior (e.g., a girl painting her nails). However, when discussing images depicting counter-stereotypical behavior, these patterns reversed: Parents used more gender-neutral labels when discussing counter-stereotypical girls compared to counter-stereotypical boys—for example, calling a girl digging for worms a “kid” more often than they called a boy painting his nails a “kid.” 

“These findings reveal a notable bias in how parents see gender, signaling that a ‘person,’ by default, is a male,” observes Leshin.

The paper’s other authors were Josie Benitez, an NYU doctoral student, Serena Fu, an NYU undergraduate at the time of the study, Sophia Cordeiro, a lab manager at NYU, and Marjorie Rhodes, a professor in NYU’s Department of Psychology. 

The research was supported by grants from the National Science Foundation (BCS-2017375) and the National Institutes of Health (1F31HD107965, R01HD087672).

# # #

END