Enthusiastic Reader’s Reviews > Delusions of Gender: How Our Minds, Society, and Neurosexism Create Difference > Status Update

p 235 - "gender scholar Michael Kimmel suggests, "gender difference is the product of gender inequality, and not the other way around.""

p 231 - "Children's views about gender differences reach "peak rigidity" between five and seven years of age." These are the "cootie years," after all ;D

(continued) "…cubbies were decorated with blue and red labels, at the door they were told to line up with Blues on this side and Reds on that side, and they were regularly referred to by group label ("Good morning, Blues and Reds"). At the end of three weeks... children, for example, preferred toys they were told were liked by their own group and expressed a greater desire to play with other Red (or Blue) children."'

p 228 - "preeschoolers in two child-care classrooms were randomly assigned to the Blue group or the Red group. Over a three-week period all the children wore a red or blue T-shirt every day (according to the group to which they'd been assigned). In one classroom, the teachers left it at that. The color groups were not mentioned again. But in the other classroom, the teachers made constant use of the two categories."

p 228 - "Children, it turns out, are also susceptible to an in-group bias to prefer what belongs to their group."

p 222 - "children take note of who is playing with what: when researchers doctored a commercial for a Playmobil Airport Set to show girls, as well as boys, playing with the toy... children shown this altered commercial were nearly twice as likely to think that the toy was for girls as well as boys, compared to children who saw the commercial in its traditional, boys-only form."

220 - "Diane Turner-Bowker examined how males and females were described in the 41 Caldecott winners and runners-up from 1984 to 1994. One gender was most commonly described as... beautiful, frightened, worthy, sweet, weak, and scared in the stories; the other gender as big, horrible, fierce, great, terrible, furious, brave, and proud... And we all know which type of person we'd rather have with us on an adventure."

p 218 - "When developmental psychologists unobtrusively watch what goes on in preschool classrooms, they find that children receive distinctly cooler responses from peers when they play in gender-inappropriate ways... this peer feedback seems to influence children's behavior, making it more stereotypical... they are particularly effective in bringing cross-gender behavior to an end."

p 217 - "children were shown a video of men and women playing a game, with the men performing one kind of ritual and the women another. Girls copied the women's ritual, and boys the men's, but only after they had confirmed for themselves that this is what women (or men) IN GENERAL did, and not just one particular woman or man." Conclusion: a gender-nonconforming parent is seen as an exception.

Excellent analogy with left- and right-handedness on 209-210.