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Running head: GENDER AND TEACHING
The Effect of Parents’ Gender Stereotypes on Their Teaching of Novel Object Labels
Melissa Frankel
Cornell University
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Abstract
Extensive research exists on the influence of gender on parental speech and on parental
teaching behaviors, but interactions between the two have not been explored. I investigated the
impact of gender on parental teaching behaviors by examining the ways in which parental
gender, infant gender, the gender of the object, and parents’ implicit beliefs about gender
influenced the teaching of novel object labels. The parent-child interactions were coded for
gender-dependent behaviors and parental speech patterns. This data was analyzed in conjunction
with the results from the Implicit Association Test. Visual representations of the data revealed
not statistically significant patterns, possibly because of low power. Mothers displayed more
stereotypical gender beliefs than fathers; this trend should be investigated in future studies.
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The Effect of Parent’s Gender Stereotypes on Their Teaching of Novel Object Labels
Gender socialization begins at an early age. The rooms of children as young as one
month old have been found to contain significantly more toys that are gender stereotyped than
those that are gender inappropriate (Rheingold & Cook, 1975). Additionally, baby boys are
typically dressed in blue and baby girls are dressed in pink, a trend that began in the 1920s
(Paoletti, 1987). However, before 18 months of age, children do not reliably identify gender
differences when viewing photographs of males and females (O’Brien & Huston, 1985).
Children’s gender stereotypes increase with age and as their ability to identify and label gender
differences solidifies (Fagot, Leinbach, & O’Boyle, 1992). Moreover, 2 to 3 year old children
whose mothers subscribe to traditional gender views successfully identify gender differences
earlier than their peers whose mothers do not hold these traditional beliefs (Fagot et al., 1992).
The current study sought to address whether gender differences influence the ways in
which parents teach their children novel object labels. Specifically, does the parent’s gender, the
parent’s gender stereotypes, the infant’s gender, the gender of the object, or some combination of
the four previous factors influence the parent’s teaching behaviors? Adult-infant interactions are
shaped by the adult’s gender stereotypes, the child’s gender, and the adult’s gender (Fagot, 1978;
Frisch, 1977). Additionally, toys intended for boys are inherently differently than toys intended
for girls; these differences influence the ways in which parents and children interact with toys
(Blakemore & Centers, 2005; O’Brien & Nagle, 1987). Thus, these four gender dimensions
should impact the methods that parents used to teach their infants novel object labels.
Gender Influences Parent-Child Interactions
Adults react differently to infants and toddlers based on the child’s gender. Fagot (1978)
found that mothers and fathers respond more frequently overall to girls than to boys. Although
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children as young as 20 months reliably favor gender appropriate toys, when children play with
gender inappropriate toys, their parents often respond negatively by stopping the child’s play or
punishing the child, either verbally or physically. This pattern of response is the most consistent
when fathers interact with their sons. Additionally, both parents encourage gender stereotyped
behaviors such as aggressive, large motor activities for boys and helpful, cooperative, imitative
actions for girls.
It is not only the biological sex of the infant or toddler that affects the ways in which
adults view him or her. Instead, the perceived sex of the infant has a greater influence on adults’
beliefs and actions. Condry and Condry (1976) showed participants a video of a 9 month old
infant reacting to various stimuli. Although everyone saw the same video, half of the
participants were told that the infant in the video was female; the remaining participants were
told that the infant was male. When the infant started crying in response to an aversive stimulus,
the participants viewing a “male” infant said that he was angry and the participants viewing a
“female” infant reported that she was scared. When this experiment was repeated with expectant
parents, fathers-to-be who scored highly on measures of male gender stereotypes classified the
infant they believed was male as significantly angrier than the infant that they believed was
female (Plant, Hyde, Keltner, & Devine, 2000). When participants were shown a video of two
toddlers playing in the snow, clothed in such a way that their features were obscured by their
snowsuits, participants rated the toddler’s aggressive behavior as more appropriate when they
were told that the toddler was male (Condry & Ross, 1985). Lastly, when an infant who was
gender neutral in appearance was presented to another mother for a play session, the mothers
provided the “male” infants with higher levels of stimulation than the “female” infants (Smith &
Lloyd, 1978).
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This gender stereotyping effect is seen even among non-parents. When non-parents
interact with 14 and 15 month old infants, the gender stereotypes to which they subscribe shape
their interactions. Non-parents with traditional views of female gender roles show significant
differences based on whether they believe they are interacting with a female or male infant
(Frisch, 1977). Overall, these adults encourage female infants to play in an interpersonal and
nurturing manner, while they encourage male infants to partake in activities with masculine
stereotyped toys (Frisch, 1977).
Gender also shapes parent-child-toy interactions. The genders of the parent, the infant,
and the toy all influence parental speech in unstructured interactions (O’Brien & Nagle, 1987).
When playing with gender neutral toys, parents use functional language that facilitates play, but
do not encourage children to play imaginatively. When playing with traditionally female toys,
parents’ verbalizations are more frequent, longer, and highly varied. When interacting with
feminine toys, parents of girls are more likely to use adverbs and adjectives than are parents of
boys. Parents ask the most questions in this context, but across all contexts fathers ask the most
wh-questions (who, what, where, why, when). Alternatively, when playing with traditionally
male toys, parents speak very little. Parents produce more verbs when interacting with female
infants than male infants. Additionally, fathers directly reference toys and use pronouns more
frequently than mothers. Fathers also use more varied language than mothers when playing with
masculine toys.
Gender of Objects
Toys intended for boys are often very different from those intended for girls. Blakemore
and Centers (2005) compiled an extensive list of toys and classified them along a continuum
from highly masculine to highly feminine, with gender neutral as the midpoint. Although some
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toys’ ratings have changed over time, toys that primarily cater to girls are generally considered to
be the most visually pleasing and are associated largely with girls’ physical appearances. Toys
that are seen as primarily for boys are largely associated with aggression or violence. These
distinctions are more pronounced among toys that are strongly gender stereotyped compared
with those that are moderately gender stereotyped. Additionally, strongly feminine toys are most
likely to be associated with nurturance or encouragement of domestic skills, but are least likely
to be educational in nature or to encourage cooperation and turn taking (Blakemore & Centers,
2005). Conversely, strongly masculine toys are most competitive, tend to involve some kind of
construction or assembly task, and are highly arousing and require parental supervision. Gender
neutral toys are frequently associated with creativity and often involve some level of artistic
skill.
Implicit Beliefs
A parent’s beliefs about gender roles may also influence the ways in which he or she
interacts with infants; however, people are often unaware of or unwilling to admit to their biases.
These implicit beliefs (beliefs outside the realm of conscious control) express a positive or
negative disposition toward a person, a group of people, or an object (Greenwald & Krieger,
2006). Dissociations, defined as discrepancies between a person’s explicitly stated beliefs and
his or her implicit attitudes, occur frequently (Greenwald & Nosek, 2001). One study that
examined explicit versus implicit beliefs from 12 difference experiments found that 42% of
participants explicitly expressed neutral beliefs, while only 18% implicitly expressed these
neutral beliefs (Greenwald & Krieger, 2006). These percentages are bound to vary based on the
participants and the types of attitudes under examination (i.e., race, gender, etc.), but the
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discrepancy is notable. However, dissociations are not inevitable; sometimes explicit and
implicit beliefs are very similar (Greenwald, Nosek, & Banaji, 2003).
Do Parents’ Beliefs about Gender Influence Teaching Behaviors?
The ways in which parents best teach their infants novel object labels is well
documented. First, 18 month olds can learn and remember novel object labels when a label is
presented concurrently with the novel object (Woodward, Markman, & Fitzsimmons, 1994).
Research also shows that infants learn object labels when an adult directs his or her attention
(through looking or pointing) to the object while he or she utters the novel label. This
phenomenon holds true even when infants are presented with an unlabeled distracter item
between hearing the novel label and viewing the novel object (Baldwin, 1993). However, if the
adult only points at the novel object and does not label it, the infants are less likely to
successfully remember these objects (Baldwin & Markman, 1989).
Furthermore, children’s vocabularies are greatly affected by their parents’ teaching
behaviors. Some research indicates that the frequency of parent-child conversations influences
the size of the child’s vocabulary (Huttenlocher, Haight, Bryk, Seltzer, & Lyons, 1991).
However, other research suggests that it is not how frequently a mother talks to her infant, but
rather the total number of words, the total number of unique words (words with different stems)
and the mean length of her utterances (MLU) that shapes her infant’s vocabulary (Hoff, 2003;
Hoff & Naigles, 2002). The more frequently an infant hears a word in isolation, as they do in a
novel object-labeling task, the more likely the infant will spontaneously produce this word at a
later time (Brent & Siskind, 2001).
Parental responsiveness is another factor bearing on an infant’s vocal development. In a
longitudinal study, infants with larger vocabularies at 13 months were more likely to have had
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mothers who shared and directed their attention at 9 months (Baumwell, Tamis-LeMonda, &
Bornstein, 1997). Another longitudinal study demonstrated that 13 month olds with highly
responsive mothers had larger vocabularies at both 13 months and 20 months (Tamis-LeMonda,
Bornstein, Baumwell, & Damast, 1996).
Current Study
The current study examined the ways in which parents teach their children novel names
for gender neutral stuffed animals. Extensive research has been conducted about parental
teaching behaviors and about the ways in which gender influences parent-child interactions, but
previous research efforts have not looked for interactions. I explored the ways in which the
parent’s gender and implicit gender beliefs, his or her child’s gender, and the perceived gender of
the toy influenced teaching by observing each parent as he or she taught his or her child the name
of two novel objects. Each novel object was gender neutral in appearance, but described as
either male or female to experimentally manipulate the gender. I hypothesized that these four
gender dimensions (parental gender, parental gender stereotypes, infant gender, and object
gender) would impact the methods that parents used to teach their infants novel object labels. If
my hypothesis was correct, I expected to see significant differences in parents’ speech, parents’
behaviors, infants’ behaviors, and parents’ implicit beliefs as a function of the aforementioned
gender variables.
Methods
Participants
Data was reported on 16 infants (eight males and eight females) and 26 parents (10
fathers and 16 mothers) from the greater Ithaca, New York area. An additional two infants (one
male and one female) and five parents (three males and two females) were tested. The data from
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these participants could not be included in analyses either because the infant cried the entire trial
(one female infant and one mother) or the parents did not speak English in the laboratory (one
male infant, one mother, and three fathers). Infants were approximately 18 months old (M = 17
months and 29.44 days, SD = 9.16 days) because infants of this age do not yet reliably
demonstrate gender stereotyping or gender identification (O’Brien & Huston, 1985). Both
parents were asked to participate to see how parental gender influences teaching. However, both
caregivers were not always able to come into the laboratory.
Participants were recruited through a database that collects infants’ names and birthdates
from birth announcements. Additionally, people often request that their contact information be
added to the database. As the infants aged into the study, parents received a letter inviting them
to participate. This letter was then followed by a phone call to encourage participation.
Apparatus
Stimuli. The stuffed animals used in this study were selected based on receiving gender
neutral ratings from a sample of undergraduate students at Cornell University. The four most
gender neutral stuffed animals were selected from the larger pool and used in the current study
(Figure 1).
Implicit Association Test. The Implicit Association Test (IAT) was administered to every
parent. The IAT measures how strongly a participant associates pairs of concepts (Greenwald &
Nosek, 2001). The idea behind the IAT is that a participant’s reaction time will be quicker when
concepts are appropriately associated. The following example clarifies how the IAT worked in
the present study.
Participants classified attributes (“power” and “warmth”) into target categories (“male”
and “female) (Lane, Banaji, Nosek, & Greenwald, 2007). Stereotypically, males are thought of
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as powerful and females are considered warm (Rudman, Greenwald, & McGhee, 2001). When
concepts were more closely associated, a participant’s reaction time was quickest. Concepts
were presented in seven blocks (Table 1). Blocks 1, 2, and 5 were warm-up tasks that presented
either target categories or attributes. In blocks 3 and 6, participants practiced associating
attributes with a target category. Blocks 4 and 7 tested the associations participants practiced in
Blocks 3 and 6. In this case, if a participant classified terms faster when “male” and “power”
were presented on one side of the screen and “female” and “warmth” were presented on the
other, the participant was said to hold stereotypical gender beliefs.
The IAT began by displaying instructions that told the participant what to expect and how
to proceed through the task. Similar instructions were displayed between each block. Although
the words they were asked to associate varied depending on the block, the task otherwise looked
the same throughout the blocks. For example, participants were asked to identify words as
meaning male or female in block 1. Thus, male was displayed on the left side of the computer
screen and female was displayed on the right side. Participants classified the words that flashed
in the middle of the screen by pressing “d” and “k” respectively. Only one category (“male,”
“female,” “power,” or “warmth”) appeared on each side of the screen in each of the warm up
blocks. In the practice and test association blocks (blocks 3, 6, 4, and 7), one target category
(“male” or “female”) and one attribute (“power” or “warmth”) appeared together on each side of
the screen. These targets and attributes were paired stereotypically in blocks 3 and 6 and gender
atypically in blocks 4 and 7. All blocks asked participants to classify words that meant “male,”
“female,” “power,” and “warmth” (Table 2) (Rudman et al., 2001).
This measure has high levels of convergent and discriminant validity (Greenwald &
Nosek, 2001). The IAT also has high levels of predictive validity in terms of predicting
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behavioral outcomes (Nosek, Greenwald, & Banaji, 2007). Additionally, it is fairly easy to
administer because participants can complete this assessment on a computer. Thus, researcher
error is virtually eliminated and participants are less likely to try to provide the answers that they
believe researchers want to hear (Greenwald & Banaji, 1995).
MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventory. Parents were asked to
collaboratively complete the “MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventory: Word
and Sentences” (MCDI). This is a checklist on which parents report the words and simple word
combinations that their children can produce (Fenson et al., 1994). This list was included to
indicate whether there were significant relationships between the ways in which a parent teaches
his or her child novel object labels and the words his or her child can say. This checklist also
ensured that any effect of infant gender was not confounded by infants of one gender having a
significantly larger vocabulary than infants of the opposite gender.
Demographic Questionnaire. Parents also received a demographic questionnaire
(Appendix A). It collected basic background information about both parents and the child. Each
parent was asked to complete the questionnaire about him or herself. The first parent filled out
the questions about the infant and the second parent was told to contribute if anything was
missing.
Procedure
Norming the Stimuli. Prior to the start of the study, fifty Cornell undergraduate students
rated ten stuffed animals to assess whether these animals appeared to have a gender association.
The students were able to touch and manipulate each stuffed animal. The students then rated the
animals on a Likert scale ranging from 1 (extremely feminine) to 7 (extremely masculine). Four
of the stuffed animals received a mean rating of approximately 4 (gender neutral). Importantly,
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these stuffed animals had unimodal distributions of ratings, which demonstrated that they really
were gender neutral and not considered extremely masculine as frequently as they were
considered extremely feminine. These four animals were then used for the present study.
Parent-Infant Interactions in the Laboratory. In the current study, each parent taught his
or her child about two of the four novel stuffed animals. The parent was told that one of these
animals was female and one was male. Each animal came with a short description, which
included the animal’s assigned gender (Appendix B). The parent was told that he or she had five
minutes (per stuffed animal) to teach his or her child the animal’s species. The species names
(hapse, galve, raf, and posp) were made-up words that are phonologically similar to words in the
English language (Fitneva, Christiansen, & Monaghan, in press). While one parent was
interacting with his or her child and the stuffed animals, the other sat in the waiting room and
completed questionnaires. The gender of the parent that interacted with the child first was
counterbalanced across the study, as was which species name and gender were assigned to which
stuffed animal.
After both parents interacted with their child, a research assistant entertained the child
while each parent completed the IAT and finished any incomplete questionnaires. The parents
were then debriefed about the purpose of the study. The entire session was videotaped so it
could be transcribed and analyzed. From start to finish, each family was in the laboratory for
approximately one hour.
Coding
Every parent’s interactions with his or her child were video recorded and then transcribed
and analyzed using Event Coder, a program that allowed a research assistant to press a key on
the computer keyboard every time a parent or an infant carried out a behavior of interest
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(Goldstein, 2007). I assigned one key to correlate with each behavior that I needed to analyze.
These interactions were first coded to note the amount of time the parent spent holding and
looking at the stuffed animal. The amount of time the infant spent holding and looking at the
stuffed animal was also noted. The amount of time that parents and infants spent looking at and
holding the stuffed animals was measured to represent that amount of time each spent engaged
with the stuffed animals. Additionally, parents’ active and passive labels were coded. A passive
label was defined as a parent stating, “This is _______ (stuffed animal species).” If the parent
incorporated the stuffed animal’s species into a game or activity, this was considered an active
label. Each time an infant attempted to say the animal’s species, it was logged. The number of
unique words each parent uttered and the parent’s MLU in each trial was recorded.
Furthermore, each parent’s implicit attitudes about gender were measured using the IAT
to see how these beliefs impacted his or her teaching. Difference scores were calculated from
each parent’s IAT output (Table 3) (Lane et al., 2007). Higher difference scores indicated more
stereotypical implicit beliefs about gender.
This study employed a 2 x 2 x 2 design to examine infant gender (male or female), parent
gender (male or female), and the assigned gender of the stuffed animal (male or female). The
results of the IAT were analyzed with a regression.
Results
Selecting the Stimuli (Stuffed Animals)
The four stuffed animals that received average ratings of approximately 4 (gender
neutral) were used as stimuli. Animal 2 (M = 3.70, SD = 1.27), animal 3 (M = 4.45, SD = 1.75),
animal 5 (M = 4.25, SD = 1.68), and animal 6 (M = 4.65, SD = 1.51) were the stimuli for the
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current study (Figure 2). There was no significant difference between the female
undergraduates’ ratings and the male undergraduates’ ratings.
Parental Speech Measures
Mothers introduced more unique words when interacting with their daughters; fathers
introduced more unique words when playing with their sons (Figure 3). A 2 (trial) x 2 (infant
gender) x 2 (parent gender) mixed analysis of variance (ANOVA) on unique words failed to
reveal significant interactions or main effects. However, visual inspection of Figure 3 showed a
pattern of parents introducing more unique words when interacting with a child of the same
gender. More statistical power is needed to determine if these differences are truly significant.
Parents were consistent across trials in the number of unique words that they said. The
correlation of unique words in trial one and trial two was significant for mothers, r (15) = .90, p
= .000. The correlation of unique words in trial one and trial two was also significant for fathers,
r (9) = .87, p = .001.
A 2 (trial) x 2 (infant gender) x 2 (parent gender) mixed ANOVA on MLU failed to show
significant differences or main effects of parents’ gender or infants’ gender. Nonetheless, visual
inspection of Figure 4 revealed a pattern of parents having higher MLUs when interacting with
boys than with girls. Again, more statistical power is needed to determine if this pattern
represents a significant difference in the population. As with number of unique words, parents
were consistent in MLU across trials. The correlation of MLU in trial one and trial two was
significant for mothers, r (15) = .81, p = .000, and fathers, r (9) = .80, p = .005.
There was no significant difference in the number of passive labels or active labels
uttered by mothers or fathers. To eliminate individual variability in each kind of label based on
the total number of times the stuffed animal was labeled, the proportion of passive labels to total
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labels was calculated for each parent. The proportion of active labels to total labels was also
calculated for each parent. There was a significant effect of parent gender on the proportion of
passive labels to total labels, t (9) = -2.422, p = .039, with fathers having a higher ratio of passive
labels than mothers. As such, there was also a significant effect of parent gender on the
proportion of active labels to total labels, t (9) = 2.422, p = .039, with mothers having a higher
ratio of active labels than fathers. IAT D scores were not significantly correlated with the
proportion of either kind of label for parents of either gender.
Parent-Infant Interactions
Visual inspection of Figure 5 demonstrated a pattern that female infants spent more time
holding the stuffed animals than male infants. However, a 2 (trial) x 2 (infant gender) x 2 (parent
gender) mixed ANOVA on the total time infants spent holding the stuffed animals failed to
display any significant differences. Here too, more statistical power is needed. Infants were
significantly consistent in the time spent holding the stuffed animals across trials when
interacting with mothers, r (15) = .632, p = .009, and fathers, r (9) = .742, p = .014. Another
pattern visible in a graph of the data was that female infants looked at the stuffed animals longer
than male infants, but only when interacting with their fathers (Figure 6). A 2 (trial) x 2 (infant
gender) x 2 (parent gender) mixed ANOVA on the total time infants spent holding the stuffed
animals also failed to find significant differences in this data with the limited statistical power
available in this study.
Visual examination of Figure 7 showed a pattern of parents of both genders spending
more time holding the stuffed animals when interacting with male infants than female infants. A
2 (trial) x 2 (infant gender) x 2 (parent gender) mixed ANOVA on the total time parents spent
holding the stuffed animals did not reveal significant differences in parents’ holding time. The
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amount of time fathers spent holding the stuffed animals was significantly correlated from trial
one to trial two, r (9) = .893, p = .001. The amount of time mothers spent holding the stuffed
animals was not significantly correlated between the two trials. A visual representation of the
amount of time parents spent looking at the stuffed animals displayed patterns of parents looking
for greater lengths of time when interacting with infants of the opposite gender (Figure 8). This
pattern was shown not to be significant by a 2 (trial) x 2 (infant gender) x 2 (parent gender)
mixed ANOVA on the total amount of time parents spent looking at the stuffed animals. Once
again, greater statistical power is necessary to see if these patterns are significant in the greater
population.
Implicit Association Test
The data from the 2 (infant gender) x 2 (parent gender) ANOVA on the scores from the
IAT suggested a main effect of gender that approached significance, but was not significant F(1,
8) = 4.41, p = .069. This trend in the D scores suggested that mothers held more stereotypical
implicit beliefs about gender than fathers (Figures 9-11). However, it is necessary to test more
participants to determine if this effect was representative of significant differences in the
population. This ANOVA revealed neither an effect of child gender on IAT D scores or an
interaction effect of parent gender and infant gender.
Next, I analyzed the impact of the amount of time mothers spent with their infants on
mothers’ gender stereotypes. Since it is impossible to accurately measure the exact amount of
time mothers spend with their infants, I used the mothers’ primary location of employment as a
proxy for the amount of time spent with their infants. Eight mothers’ primary occupations
occurred in their homes; eight mothers’ primary occupations occurred outside of their homes.
Mothers who worked outside of their homes had marginally significantly more stereotypical
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implicit beliefs about gender than mothers who worked in their homes, t (14) = -2.05, p = .059.
Figure 12 depicts a visual representation of the mothers’ D scores as a function of their primary
place of employment, illustrating this pattern. There was no significant difference in the
proportion of the kind of label mothers used (passive or active) to name the stuffed animal based
on their primary place of employment.
Discussion
The Current Study
Interesting patterns emerged that require future investigation. I expected to find
significant differences in parental speech patterns and behaviors and infants’ behaviors based on
gender. Although I did not find any such differences, it is likely that these were obscured by low
statistical power. It is also possible that the glaring differences evident in the literature no longer
exist because many of the publications are decades old. Recent research is scarce and focuses on
older children than those who participated in the current study. Even though none of the
differences were significant, visual representations of the data indicate patterns in parental
speech and behaviors and infants’ behaviors that should be investigated further. The two
measures of syntactic complexity, number of unique words and MLU, revealed conflicting
findings. As judged by MLU, parents had more complex speech when interacting with their
sons; as judged by number of unique words, a parent had more complex speech when playing
with a child of the same gender. It is surprising that two variables used to measure the same
thing, syntactic complexity, would show dissimilar data patterns.
The patterns in the behavioral data from the interactions were also surprising. I expected
that similar patterns would emerge across looking and holding time because they both measured
attention focused toward the stuffed animals. However, this did not seem to be the case.
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Although female infants spent more time holding the stuffed animals, regardless of with which
parent they were interacting, they only spent more time looking at the stuffed animals when
playing with their fathers. Furthermore, mothers and fathers spent more time holding the stuffed
animals when interacting with male infants. This pattern is unsurprising when considering that
male infants spent less time holding the stuffed animals than female infants. However, what was
surprising was that parents spent more time looking at the stuffed animals when playing with
infants of the opposite gender. These patterns, although not significant, suggest that looking and
holding time do not necessarily measure the same thing (how engaged parents or infants were
with the stuffed animals).
The results of the IAT were the most unexpected of all of the patterns that emerged from
the data. A trend in the data suggested that mothers held more stereotypical implicit beliefs
about gender than fathers. This was surprising because Lytton and Romney’s (1991) review of
172 studies found that fathers treat their children in more gender stereotypical ways than
mothers. This meta-analysis covered so many studies that children of all ages, from less than
one year old to adulthood, were included. Additionally, the marginally significant finding that
mothers who work outside their homes had stronger gender stereotypes than mothers who work
inside their homes requires attention in future studies. Previous research has found that mothers
who are employed outside of the house have less stereotypical gender beliefs, which conflicts
with the current, marginally significant, finding (Hoffman & Kloska, 1995).
In the context of the increasingly gender egalitarian 21st century, it is counterintuitive that
females subscribe to more stereotypical implicit gender biases than males, especially since the
perception of females is most changed by greater gender equality (Diekman & Eagly, 2000).
One possible explanation for this trend, which should be explored in future studies, is that
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women’s gender stereotypes are activated by playing with their infants directly before
completing the IAT. Participants’ attitudes and stereotypes can be automatically activated when
they are primed with a word or experience before the completing a task, but all people are not
manipulated by the same primes (Bargh, Chaiken, Raymond, & Hymes, 1996; Smeesters,
Yzerbyt, Corneille, & Warlop, 2009). As such, parent-child interactions may not activate
fathers’ implicit gender stereotypes in the same manner that these play sessions activate mothers’
stereotypes.
There are a few ways in which these beliefs could have been activated in the present
study. First, it is possible that situational norms, or behaviors associated with a particular
environment, activated mothers’ implicit beliefs. Situational norms are automatically activated
when a person actively seeks out the environment and when specific behaviors are strongly
associated with the environment (Aarts & Dijksterhuis, 2003). The playroom in which parents
interacted with their infants could have activated mothers’ caregiving norms and the implicit
beliefs that accompany caregiving. Another possible explanation is that mothers were
unconsciously primed to achieve the goal of acting like “good mothers.” When people are
primed to perform well, they outperform peers who are not exposed to these primes (Bargh,
Gollwitzer, Lee-Chai, Barndollar, & Trotschel, 2001). The knowledge that they were being
observed and analyzed could have implicitly encouraged mothers to act more maternally, which
impacted their IAT scores. Lastly, it is possible that the act of caregiving, which is a
stereotypically female task, primed mothers’ gender stereotypical behaviors. These stereotypical
behaviors then triggered the implicit beliefs that were visible in their IAT scores. Bargh, Chen,
and Burrow (1996) supported this argument when they discovered that people display social
behaviors that are consistent with the stereotypes with which they are primed.
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Although these three explanations are plausible in isolation, I believe that they better
explain the trends in mothers’ IAT scores when argued in conjunction with one another.
Situational norms could activate mothers’ goal directed behaviors. To achieve their goals and
act in an environmentally appropriate manner, mothers must behave in a stereotypically feminine
way. More concretely, this argument claims that the presence of the infants and the context of
the laboratory combined with mothers’ desires to appear maternal led the mothers to act like
caregivers, which primed their gender stereotypical implicit beliefs. The situation was more
unusual and so the goal of acting maternally was more pronounced for mothers who work
primarily outside of their homes and spend less time with their infants. Thus, their infants served
as more salient primes and these mothers displayed the most gender stereotypical implicit beliefs
on the IAT.
Expanding on the Current Study
First and foremost, this study must be repeated with a larger sample size. With more
subjects, and an equal number of parents of each gender, initial trends will be further developed.
However, the trends that emerged from the existing data are telling. When repeating the current
study with a larger sample, additional variables should be coded and their impact should be
analyzed. First, the amount of time a parent spends engaged in bouts of joint attention with their
infant should be analyzed. Joint attention, a hallmark of parental sensitivity to his or her infant’s
needs, is “the ability to coordinate attention toward a social partner and an object of mutual
interest” (Bakeman & Adamson, 1984, p. 1278). There is a positive association between joint
attention and an infant’s vocabulary size at 21 months (Tomasello, Mannle, & Kruger, 1986).
Additionally, when mothers and infants coordinate bouts of joint attention, they vocalize more
frequently, they hold longer conversations, and mothers speak in shorter sentences and with
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more comments instead of questions or directives (Tomasello & Farrar, 1986). I was unable to
measure joint attention in this study because of filming inexperience; when an 18 month old is
running around the laboratory, it is difficult to film in such a way that allows for coding the
parent’s and infant’s eye gaze directed at the stuffed animal and at one another. Future research
should rectify this recording difficulty and examine if differences in the amount of time spent
engaged in joint attention, and whether the parent labels the novel object while in joint attention
with his or her infant, are significant.
After coding where parents and infants are looking, not just if they are looking at the
novel object, it will also be important to note whether parents are following their infant’s line of
sight or redirecting where their infant is looking. For infants to successfully learn novel words,
parents must be aware of and sensitive to their infant’s needs. Researchers have found that a
child better learns a novel object label when his or her parents notice where the infant is looking
and label the object in the infant’s line of sight, instead of redirecting the infant’s attention to a
different object (Dunham, Dunham, & Curwin, 1993).
The acoustic characteristics of parents’ speech should be measured and analyzed.
Specifically, pitch contours, or fundamental frequency (F0), should be examined. F0 was not
analyzed in the current study because (to my knowledge) there are no studies that document the
benefits of exaggerated F0 for 18 month olds’ word learning. However, the preference for the
enhanced F0 associated with infant-directed speech is well documented among four month old
infants (Fernald & Kuhl, 1987). Additionally, the exaggerated F0 associated with infant-directed
speech has been shown to help younger infants segment words, which can assist them in
incorporating these words into their lexicons (Thiessen, Hill, & Saffran, 2005). Thus, future
The Effect of
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replications of the current study should look at F0 to note possible differences based on parental
or infant gender.
In addition to increasing the sample size, the gender assigned to the gender neutral
stimuli should be more obvious in future studies. The gender assigned to each stimulus was only
included in the short description that accompanied each animal. To avoid biasing the parentchild interactions or the IAT, the parent’s attention was not specifically directed to the assigned
gender in the description. Many parents either did not notice the gender assignment or chose to
ignore it. This is unsurprising in light of research that has observed adults’ and children’s (ages
3-10 years) structured interactions with stuffed animals (Lambdin, Greer, Jibotian, Wood, &
Hamilton, 2003). When they were presented with stuffed animals that were previously rated as
gender neutral, most adults and children perceived these animals as male. Even when authority
figures suggested that these animals were female, children still tended to see them as male. From
this data, Lambdin et al. (2003) proposed the animal = male hypothesis, which suggests that
people are likely to view gender neutral animals as male. Thus, when replicating the current
study, researchers should be less subtle in assigning genders to the stimuli to allow for
exploration into the impact of the object’s gender on parental teaching behaviors. This question
ultimately could not be examined in the present study because so many of the parents referred to
the stuffed animal as “he” or “it,” regardless of the assigned gender.
Although the current study examined parents’ and infants’ behavior, there was no
measure of whether the infants learned the names assigned to the novel objects. Eighteen month
old infants vary greatly in their ability to produce words, so whether the infant can say the
stuffed animal’s species name is frequently not indicative of his or her learning. Instead, a
simple learning measure should be included in future replications of the current study. After the
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parents have taught all of the novel object labels, both parents and the infant will reenter the
playroom, which will contain all of the toys that were present during the teaching trials and two
of the novel stuffed animals. The two stuffed animals will be counterbalanced across infants, but
each parent will have taught about one stuffed animal and there will always be one male and one
female animal. Both parents will then ask the infant to find and bring them the stuffed animals.
It will be recorded whether the infant retrieves each stuffed animal and this will be used as a
measure of infants’ learning of the novel object labels. Furthermore, it would be interesting to
see if the infants who better learn the novel object labels elicited more frequently labeling of the
object throughout the trial by gesturing toward the animal or presenting their parent with the
animal.
A future study should further investigate the trend of mothers displaying more
stereotypical implicit beliefs about gender than fathers. A larger sample size will most likely
produce more significant differences. Additionally, if interacting with their infants activates
mothers’ implicit gender stereotypes, research needs to examine why mothers who worked
outside of the home had stronger biases activated than mothers who worked in their homes.
Empirical support is necessary to determine whether my aforementioned suspicion is correct and
infants act as more salient primes when mothers spend less time with them. It should be
investigated whether infants only activate mothers’ gender stereotypes or whether this
phenomenon also applies to female non-parents. Lastly, research should also examine whether
these differences disappear when mothers are not in an infant laboratory and have not interacted
with their infants for a few hours. This phenomenon could be explored by asking mothers to
complete the IAT outside of the laboratory after running errands (or some other solo activity) for
a couple of hours. After the differences in implicit gender stereotypes have been clarified,
The Effect of
24
relationships between implicit gender beliefs, place of employment, and mothers’ behaviors or
speech patterns should be further developed.
In attempting to answer these pending questions, researchers must bear in mind that
repeated administration of the IAT to the same person is correlated with more modest D scores in
successive trials (Greenwald et al., 2003). As such, conducting a study that compares differences
in women’s gender stereotypes with and without the presence of an infant to prime their implicit
beliefs must work around this challenge. One possible way to bypass this hurdle is to employ a
between-subjects design that controls for mothers’ primary place of employment or female nonparents’ previous experience with infants. This design cannot reveal the ways in which
interacting with an infant influences each woman’s implicit beliefs about gender, but a withinsubjects design in which females complete an IAT before and after interacting with their infants
can. The less exaggerated scores associated with repeating the IAT could be avoided if
participants do not repeat the same IAT, but instead complete two different IATs with two
different sets of attributes that both measure gender stereotypes. In addition to the IAT
completed in the current study, participants could classify words associated with math, a
stereotypically masculine subject, and arts, a stereotypically feminine subject, into the target
categories of “male” and “female” (Greenwald & Nosek, 2001).
The current study assumed that parents’ teaching behaviors are influenced by many
factors. Specifically, it looked to see the impact of the parent’s gender, the infant’s gender, the
parent’s implicit beliefs about gender, and the gender of the object on parental teaching
behaviors. Ultimately, the study assumed that it was important to know what influences parents
because parents influence their infants. However, if future studies further develop the nearly
significant differences in parents’ implicit beliefs, and demonstrate that infants are serving to
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activate these beliefs, it could turn out that infants, as well as parents, drive parent-infant
interactions.
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Author Note
Melissa Frankel, Department of Human Development, Cornell University.
I want to thank Dr. Michael Goldstein and Dr. Jennifer Schwade for their countless hours
of assistance in bringing my honors thesis to fruition. I also want to thank Dr. Marianella
Casasola for all of her help in the honors thesis seminar. Additionally, I want to thank Dr. Tamar
Kushnir, as well as Dr. Michael Goldstein and Dr. Marianella Casasola, for taking the time to
read and provide feedback for my honors thesis. I also want to thank Travis Carter for all of his
assistance in creating and running the Implicit Association Test. I additionally want to thank the
Hunter R. Rawlings III Cornell Presidential Research Scholarship for funding my research.
Lastly, I want to thank all of my friends, family, and the research assistants in the BABY Lab for
their support throughout my project.
Correspondence concerning this honors thesis should be addressed to Melissa H. Frankel,
Department of Human Development, Cornell University, mhf22@cornell.edu.
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Appendix A
Participant Questionnaire
Stuffed Animals’ Names
About You:
1.
What is your age? ____________
Your gender? ___________
2.
Is English the primary language spoken at home? _________
List any other languages your infant hears regularly.
3.
Circle the highest educational level you have attained:
None (please go to 3a)
High school diploma or equivalent
Associate degree
Vocational degree
partial college
Bachelor’s degree
Master’s degree
Ph.D, J.D., M.D., etc.
3a. If you answered “none” above, what is the highest grade in school that you completed? ____
4.
What is your racial/ethnic identity?
White (non-Hispanic)
African American
Puerto Rican
Mexican
Cuban
Japanese
Chinese
Vietnamese
Korean
American Indian
Pacific Islander
Asian Indian
Other (please specify) ___________
5.
Do you work outside the home? ___________
If so, what is your occupation?
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About your baby:
1. How old is your infant?
2. If you have other children, what are their ages?
3. Was your infant premature? _____________ If so, were there any complications?
4. What activities have you and your baby done this morning?
5. What sort of mood has he/she been in today?
6. Did he/she get a good night’s sleep last night?
7. Has he/she been sick during the last week?
8. Is your voice different when you talk to your baby?_______ If so, how?
8a. How does your infant respond to your speech?
9. Do you think your baby responds more to your voice or to your facial expressions and
gestures?______ If so, how?
10. What sounds does your baby like to listen to?
11. What kinds of games do you like to play with your infant?
12. What kinds of toys does your infant like to play with?
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Appendix B
Stuffed Animal Descriptions
1. This animal belongs to the Galve species of animals. S/he lives in the desert. S/he can
live for a long time without drinking water. S/he likes to eat some kinds of cactuses.
Sometimes s/he goes near the wrong type of cactus and s/he gets pricked. S/he hates
when that happens because it makes his/her skin hurt.
2. This animal belongs to the Hapse species of animals. S/he lives in the rainforest. S/he
eats grasses and leaves. His/her favorite types of leaves are those found on palm trees.
S/he loves to climb trees. S/he also loves to sleep.
3. This animal belongs to the Raf species of animals. S/he lives in the Northeast in the
summer and the Southeast in the winter. S/he likes both places, but it’s a long trip and
s/he gets tired. S/he will eat almost any kind of plant s/he can find in either place.
4. This animal belongs to the Posp species of animals. S/he lives in Alaska, so s/he is used
to the cold. S/he loves to play in the snow and on the ice. S/he eats a lot in the summer
to make up for the fact that s/he eats very little in the winter because s/he has a hard time
finding food in the winter in Alaska.
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Table 1
Implicit Association Test Blocks
Block
Left Key Assignment
Right Key Assignment
1 – Warm up
Male
Female
2 – Warm up
Power
Warmth
3 - Practice association # 1
Male
Female
Power
Warmth
Male
Female
Power
Warmth
5 – Warm up
Warmth
Power
6 - Practice association # 2
Male
Female
Warmth
Power
Male
Female
Warmth
Power
4 - Test association # 1
7 - Test association # 2
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Table 2
IAT Stimuli
Male Words
Female Words
Power Words
Warmth Words
Male
Female
Power
Warm
Man
Woman
Strong
Nurture
Sir
Lady
Confident
Nice
Boy
Girl
Dominant
Love
Guy
Gal
Potent
Caring
He
She
Command
Gentle
Him
Her
Assert
Kind
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Table 3
Calculation of D Scores from IAT Data Taken Directly from Lane et al. (2007)
1
Delete trials greater than 10,000 msec
2
Delete subjects for whom more than 10% of trials have latency less than 300 msec
3
Compute the “inclusive” standard deviation for all trials in Stages 3 and 6 and likewise for
all trials in Stages 4 and 7
4
Compute the mean latency for responses for each of Stages 3, 4, 6, and 7
5
Compute the two mean differences (MeanStage6 – MeanStage3) and (MeanStage7-MeanStage4)
6
Divide each difference score by its associated “inclusive” standard deviation
7
D = the equal-weight average of the two resulting ratios
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Figure Captions
Figure 1. Stuffed animals used as stimuli.
Figure 2. Mean ratings of stuffed animal gender from 1 (extremely feminine) to 7 (extremely
masculine). Error bars = + 1 standard error (SE).
Figure 3. Mean number of unique words as a function of parental and child gender. Error bars =
+ 1 SE.
Figure 4. Mean MLU as a function of parental and child gender. Error bars = + 1 SE.
Figure 5. Mean time infants spent holding stuffed animals as a function of parental and child
gender. Error bars = + 1 SE.
Figure 6. Mean time infants spent looking at stuffed animals as a function of parental and child
gender. Error bars = + 1 SE.
Figure 7. Mean time parents spent holding stuffed animals as a function of parental and child
gender. Error bars = + 1 SE.
Figure 8. Mean time parents spent looking at stuffed animals as a function of parental and child
gender. Error bars = + 1 SE.
Figure 9. Mean IAT scores as a function of parental gender. Error bars = + 1 SE.
Figure 10. Maternal IAT scores by child gender.
Figure 11. Paternal IAT scores by child gender.
Figure 12. Mean maternal IAT scores as a function of place of employment. Error bars = + 1
SE.
Figure 1.
Figure 2.
Figure 3.
Figure 4.
Figure 5.
Figure 6.
Figure 7.
Figure 8.
Figure 9.
Figure 10.
Figure 11.
Figure 12.