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Sex is biologically determined from conception, but gender is a psychosocial construct determined by individuals' experience of being male or female, being largely learned through environmental and social cues. What impact does this have on children and is gender a problem that needs to be addressed?.
All human eggs contain an X chromosome, so our sex rests on the outcome of a race for the egg between millions of spermatozoa, each of which has either an X or Y chromosome. If a spermatozoon with an X chromosome gets there first, the foetus will be XX and female; alternatively, an XY combination denotes a male.
According to Yanof (2000), children are able to ascribe a gender to themselves by the time they are around two or three years old. However, a child's concept of gender is different from an adult's. A girl can choose an anatomically correct doll as being 'like me', yet is unable to label the doll correctly according to its genitalia (Yanof, 2000). This suggests it is unnecessary for a child to understand the relationship between gender and genitals before identifying as a boy or a girl.
A further study by Zosul et al (2009) showed such self-identification depends on children between the ages of two and three years uncovering gender-related information. This was confirmed by LoBue and Deloache (2011), who showed while toddlers are beginning to talk about gender and acquire gender-related knowledge, their colour preferences are also gender-based. The authors investigated almost 200 children aged between seven months and five years who were offered eight pairs of objects and asked to choose one. There was always a pink object in every pair. By the age of two years, pink objects were chosen more often by girls than boys, and by the age of 2.5 years, '... they had a significant preference for the colour pink over other colours.'In contrast, boys increasingly avoided pink.
This is hardly surprising given the widespread parental and societal preference to dress infants in the gender-specific colours of blue for boys and pink for girls. An additional impetus towards the popular trend for selecting gender-specific clothing, toys and accessories could be the availability of prenatal testing, which allows parents to select gender-specific coloured products well in...
