From Pink Frilly Dresses to ‘One of the Boys’: A Social-Cognitive Analysis of Gender Identity Development and Gender Bias

In middle childhood, many girls go through a curious metamorphosis, in which their earlier embrace of all-things-feminine appears to transform into an identity as a tomboy. We believe this striking shift, observed in girls but not boys, signifies a critical development in children’s sociocognitive functioning, with implications for their understanding of gender as it relates to their identity and their social relationships. In this article, we review the evidence for this identity shift and present a theoretical account that integrates ideas from social cognition and social development. We argue that this identity shift involves the emergence of public regard and status awareness, with concurrent increases in the complexity with which knowledge associated with gender categories is represented in the mind. We then posit that these changes have important implications for the developmental trajectory of implicit and explicit gender attitudes and stereotypes, and we present a set of predictions generated by our theoretical analysis. Gender is one of the earliest learned and most influential social identities throughout the lifespan (Bem, 1993). Gender identity is usually seen as relatively stable; except in rare circumstances, an individual remains a male or female for life despite contextually-based shifts in certain features, such as the salience of gender identity or the display of gendertyped behaviors (Deaux & LaFrance, 1998). Yet, gender identities can change. According to social identity theory, individuals seeking to maximize their self-esteem may move from identifying with a low-status social group to a higher-status one if boundaries between the groups are permeable (Tajfel & Turner, 1979, 1986). Given the status disparity between men and women (Deaux & LaFrance, 1998; Rudman & Glick, 2008), it is interesting to ask whether this social identity principle applies to gender. Childhood is an especially exciting time to view gender through the lens of social identity principles. It is during this period that individuals first learn about gender categories, the boundaries of those categories, and their permanence (Ruble, Martin, & Berenbaum, 2006). Gender is also extremely salient to most children in their everyday lives (Ruble et al., 2006). Although basic self-categorization into a gender group may not normally change after preschool, gender identity consists of multiple dimensions that may be flexible, such as the centrality of gender to one’s self-concept or how typical one feels (Halim & Ruble, 2010; Tobin et al., 2010). Moreover, whereas gender identity during the preschool years primarily connects to specific gender-typed activities and interests (e.g., dolls and princesses versus trucks and superheroes), gender identity during middle childhood takes on larger meanings in terms of interpersonal relationships, intergroup evaluations, and one’s place in society. During the same time period, substantial Social and Personality Psychology Compass 5/11 (2011): 933–949, 10.1111/j.1751-9004.2011.00399.x a 2011 Blackwell Publishing Ltd advancements in children’s social-cognitive processes occur that may motivate and enable social identity change. In this paper, we suggest that aspects of gender identity have the potential to become dynamic because of two important social cognitive developments that occur between preschool and middle childhood: (i) changes in children’s awareness of the variation that exists in evaluative standpoints toward social categories (public regard); and (ii) changes in children’s representations of gender categories (see Table 1). We describe how these two sets of social-cognitive processes contribute to gender identity changes and then suggest how this social-cognitive framework can inform a wider range of identity-relevant phenomena, such as intergroup beliefs and attitudes. We begin our review with an illustrative phenomenon that captures the kind of gender identity-relevant change that appears to take place during this time period. An Illustrative Phenomenon: The Pink Frilly Dress Social-cognitive processes underlying shifts in gender identity are manifested in one particularly intriguing phenomenon. Recently, preschooland kindergarten-aged girls seen flitting around in pink, frilly dresses have caught the attention of both the media and psychologists (e.g., Bailey, 2008; Bates, 2009; Orenstein, 2010; Ruble, Lurye, & Zosuls, 2007a; Ruble et al., 2007b). Glittery chiffon peeks out of their winter jackets even on the coldest of days. These girls not only love pink – they demand to wear pink and refuse to wear pants nearly every single day and for every occasion, even when inconvenient and inappropriate, such as when they have run out of clean pink clothes or when embarking on a day of strenuous outdoor activities. (Halim et al., forthcoming; Ruble et al., 2007a). This phenomenon – which we call ‘PFD’ for ‘pink frilly dress’ – is striking, seen in 74% of the 3to 4-year-old girls in a recent empirical study (Halim et al., forthcoming). Interestingly, PFD does not seem to be simply the result of parent socialization; many parents report being forced to negotiate with and often yield to their daughters on the issues of wearing such clothing (Halim et al., forthcoming). Moreover, PFD was found to be linked to girls’ positive evaluation of their gender identity and with a greater understanding that gender is relatively stable over time (Halim et al., forthcoming), Table 1 Framework of social cognitive developmental changes affecting gender identity shifts