Local levels of gender inequality, not parents’ ideology, predict children’s gender-based objectification

• In Event: The role of parents and environments in shaping the children's gendered attitudes and cognition

Abstract

Objectification describes the psychological process of relegating humans to the status of objects. Despite its varied manifestations, one consistent pattern has emerged from the literature: objectification is a highly gendered phenomenon, primarily targeting women (Frederickson & Roberts, 1997; Heflick & Goldenberg, 2009; 2014) and girls (Holland & Haslam, 2016). Such gender-based patterns of objectification have been documented extensively in adults, but their developmental origins—and the environmental influences that sustain them—remain unknown. In a large-scale study of children from across the U.S. (N = 370), we sought to (1) document the incidence of gender-based objectification in childhood and (2) identify the aspects of children’s environments—including parents’ beliefs and features of children’s neighborhoods—that account for individual variation in this phenomenon.

We tested our novel measures of objectification on separate samples of children. First, we examined the extent to which children (N=170, Mage=7.54 years, range=5-10) associated boys with human-like properties (e.g., “Gets really hungry”) and girls with object-like properties (e.g., “Never sweats”). We found that these associations developed gradually and varied by children’s gender: with age, girls (but not boys) judged human-like properties as more common in boy than girl targets (p=.002). In our second measure, we examined whether children (N=182, Mage=7.59 years, range=5-10) conceptually overlapped their concepts of “girls” with “objects” and “boys” with “humans” in a speeded categorization task. Here, boys—but not girls—showed the predicted pattern of objectification, erroneously categorizing pictures of girls as “toys” more often than pictures of boys (p=.018).

We next sought to examine whether these patterns of gender-based objectification varied as a function of children’s environments. In addition to probing the role of parents’ ideology (which predicts a wide range of children’s behaviors; e.g., Leshin et al., 2022), we explored relevant features of children’s neighborhoods, as past research suggests that differences in children’s local environments predict variation in early social cognition across various domains (e.g., stereotyping, essentialism; Pauker et al., 2016; Mandalaywala et al., 2020). We focused our investigation on the Gini Index within children’s neighborhoods—a measure that reflects community-level income inequality. This measure is strongly associated with gender-based inequality (IMF.org) and has been found to correspond to other markers of female objectification in prior research (Blake et al., 2018).

Parents’ political orientation toward social issues did not moderate children’s levels of gender-based objectification, but the Gini Index in children’s neighborhoods did. Indeed, we observed a robust effect of the Gini Index, in interaction with children’s age, on our first measure of objectification: higher levels of income inequality predicted younger children’s belief that human-like properties are more common in boys than girls (p=.001; Figure 1). Together, our findings suggest that gender-based objectification emerges early in development and is sensitive to features in children’s environments, including those related to gender inequality. In doing so, we deepen our understanding of the more distal environmental forces that contribute to children’s developing beliefs about gendered phenomena like objectification.

Authors

• Rachel Leshin, New York University
  Presenting Author

• Marjorie Rhodes, New York University