Early preschool environments and gender: Effects of gender pedagogy in Sweden

The purpose of this study is to examine possible differences in 3-6-year-old children's perceptions of gender according to whether they attend a preschool working with gender-neutral pedagogy, or a conventional preschool. The authors define a gender-neutral preschool as a preschool with specific policies and practices aimed at creating a gender-neutral environment.

Compared with children from conventional preschools, a larger percentage of children in the gender-neutral preschool are interested in playing with unfamiliar other-gender children. Similarly, children from the gender-neutral preschool score lower in the task about gender stereotyping, which means that they are less likely to associate unfamiliar boys and girls with culturally determined features. On the other hand, the children in the gender-neutral preschool are not less likely to automatically encode another person's gender, and the likelihood of choosing children of their own gender as their preferred playmates from the preschool (familiar children) was the same regardless of type of preschool.
According to the authors, the results suggest that gender-neutral pedagogy can have moderate effects on how children think and feel about people of different genders, but children's tendency to spontaneously notice gender does not seem to be affected. The pedagogical practice in the preschool can thus have meaningful effects on children's gender perceptions early in their development. However, the authors also stress that the presence of automatic encoding of gender, gender preferences and stereotyping among children in both types of preschools indicates that other factors than preschool pedagogy contribute to children's development of gender categories early in life.

In order to test whether the preschool environment affects children's awareness of gender, 80 3-6-year-old children from one gender-neutral and three conventional preschools took part in a number of measures designed to assess gender-based social preferences, gendered stereotypes and automatic encoding of gender. The children carried out a task on automated encoding of gender, after which they were given different tasks to assess their gender perceptions and gender stereotyping. In the tasks, the children saw a number of colour photos of children dressed in gender-neutral clothing, but with different hair lengths and obvious boy/girl names. A task could entail a child looking at a photo of a boy and a photo of a girl, and then being asked: "Which child would you rather play with? You can choose Miranda, Dennis or both". The aim of the different tasks was to examine whether children from the gender-neutral preschool were less aware of gender or less likely to draw on gender markers than children from conventional preschools. The children's parents supplied information on the families' level of education and choice of preschool, for example. The data material was analysed statistically using generalised linear regression models.

Shutts, K., Kenward, B., Falk, H., Ivegran, A., & Fawcett, C. (2017). Early preschool environments and gender: Effects of gender pedagogy in Sweden. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 162, 1-17.