Decoding Gender Schema Theory: Shaping Identities from an Early Age

What is gender schema theory? Gender schema theory was formally introduced by Sandra Bem in 1981 as a cognitive theory to explain how people become gendered in society, and how sex-linked characteristics are kept and sent to other members of a culture. Gender-associated details is primarily transmuted through society by way of schemata, or networks of info that permit for some details to be more quickly taken in than others. Bem argues that there are private differences in the degree to which people hold these gender schemata.

These differences are manifested by means of the degree to which individuals are sex-typed. It concerns the development of an internal schema, or mental structure, which arranges and directs the habits of an individual as a male or female. For example, the gender schema of being female might include the proposal "I am a woman, so I have fun with dolls, not trucks."

As everyone ought to know male and female children end up being "masculine" and "womanly", and generally at a very young age.

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By the time they are four years of age, for instance, girls and boys are normally come to choose activities defined by the culture as appropriate for their sex and also to prefer same-sex peers. The acquisition of sex-appropriate choices, abilities, character qualities, behaviors, and self-concept is normally described within psychology as sex-typing.

When children are younger, including me, parents tell the girls don’t play with cars, those are for boys. Girls play with dolls, and because you are a girl you must play with dolls, and vice versa for the males.

The children gain and follow this information as they go on they are being punished or rewarded for their actions. For example, the girl will stop playing with the toy car, and won’t be yelled at by her parents for playing with a boy’s toy. As the years go by they believe all of this is true because people tell them it is and their culture also tells them this so they continue with this information.