Gender Stereotypes in 5-7 year old Children

Stereotypes are common, but at what age do they start? This study investigates stereotypes in young children aged 5-7 years old. There are four studies reported in the paper, and all four datasets are provided here.

Usage

children_gender_stereo

Format

This data object is more unusual than most. It is a list of 4 data frames. The four data frames correspond to the data used in Studies 1-4 of the referenced paper, and these data frames each have variables (columns) that are among the following:

subject

Subject ID. Note that Subject 1 in the first data frame (dataset) does not correspond to Subject 1 in the second data frame.

gender

Gender of the subject.

age

Age of the subject, in years.

trait

The trait that the children were making a judgement about, which was either nice or smart.

target

The age group of the people the children were making judgements about (as being either nice or smart): children or adults.

stereotype

The proportion of trials where the child picked a gender target that matched the trait that was the same as the gender of the child. For example, suppose we had 18 pictures, where each picture showed 2 men and 2 women (and a different set of people in each photo). Then if we asked a boy to pick the person in each picture who they believed to be really smart, this stereotype variable would report the fraction of pictures where the boy picked a man. When a girl reviews the photos, then this stereotype variable reports the fraction of photos where she picked a woman. That is, this variable differs in meaning depending on the gender of the child. (This variable design is a little confusing, but it is useful when analyzing the data.)

high_achieve_caution

The proportion of trials where the child said that children of their own gender were high-achieving in school.

interest

Average score that measured the interest of the child in the game.

difference

A difference score between the interest of the child in the “smart” game and their interest in the “try-hard” game.

Source

Bian L, Leslie SJ, Cimpian A. 2017. "Gender stereotypes about intellectual ability emerge early and influence children's interests". Science 355:6323 (389-391). https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aah6524.

The original data may be found here.

Details

The structure of the data object is a little unusual, so we recommend reviewing the Examples section before starting your analysis.

Thank you to Nicholas Horton for pointing us to this study and the data!

Most of the results in the paper can be reproduced using the data provided here.

% TODO(David) - Add short descriptions of each study.

Examples

# This dataset is a little funny to work with.
# If wanting to review the data for a study, we
# recommend first assigning the corresponding
# data frame to a new variable. For instance,
# below we assign the second study's data to an
# object called `d` (d is for data!).
d <- children_gender_stereo[[2]]