Gender and Group Process: A Developmental Perspective

Until recently, the study of gender development has focused mainly on sex typing as an attribute of the individual. Although this perspective continues to be enlightening, recent work has focused increasingly on children’s tendency to congregate in same-sex groups. This self-segregation of the two sexes implies that much of childhood gender enactment occurs in the context of samesex dyads or larger groups. There are emergent properties of such groups, so that certain Among researchers who study the psychology of gender, a central viewpoint has always been that individuals progressively acquire a set of behaviors, interests, personality traits, and cognitive biases that are more typical of their own sex than of the other sex. And the individual’s sense of being either a male or a female person (gender identity) is thought to be a core element in the developing sense of self. The acquisition of these sexdistinctive characteristics has been called sex typing, and much research has focused on how and why the processes of sex typing occur. A favorite strategy has been to examine differences among individuals in how sex typed they are at a given age, searching for factors associated with a person’s becoming more or less “masculine” or more or less “feminine” than other individuals. In early work, there was a heavy emphasis on the famsex-distinctive qualities occur at the level of the group rather than at the level of the individual. There is increasing research interest in the distinctive nature of the group structures, activities, and interactions that typify all-male as compared with all-female groups, and in the socialization that occurs within these groups. Next steps in research will surely call for the integration of the individual and group perspectives.