Gender Schema Theory (Martin and Halverson, 1981)

• They argued the process of acquiring info about one's own gender happens before gender consistency is achieved
• According to them, basic gender identity is sufficient for a child to identify as a boy/girl and take an interest in what behaviours are appropriate

Schemas:

• Explains gender development in schemas - clusters of info about gender-appropriate behaviour
• Children learn these schemas from their interactions with people - what to wear, how to act etc.

Ingroup and Outgroup Processes:

• Children are most interested in the schemas appropriate for their own gender
• If you're a girl then you focus on feminine schemas; if you're a boy you focus on masculine schemas; in both cases these are called ingroup schemas
• From an early age, before gender constancy, children focus on ingroup schemas to avoid behaviours that belong to outgroup schemas

Resilience of Gender Beliefs:

• This theory can explain why children hold very fixed gender attitudes; it's because they ignore any information they encounter that isn't consistent with ingroup information
• E.g., if a boy sees a film with a male nurse this information is likely to be ignored because the man isn't behaving consistently with ingroup schema

Commentary:
Gender Stereotypes Without Constancy:

• Martin and Little (1990) found that children under the age of 4 showed no signes of gender stability let alone signs of constancy, but did display gender stereotypes about what boys and girls were permitted to do
• This shows that they've acquired info about gender roles before Kohlberg suggested, in line with gender schema theory

Ingroup and Outgroup effects:

• If gender schemas are important in acquiring info about ingroup gender then we would expect children to pay greater attention to info consistent with gender schemas and to remember info better
• Martin and Halverson (1983) found that when children were asked to recall pictures of people, children under six recalled more of the gender-consistent ones, than gender-inconsistent
• Children also appear to pay greatest attention to ingroup rather than outgroup schema
• Bradbard et al (1986) told four-to-nine yr olds that certain gender-neutral items were either boy or girl items
• PPs took a greater interest in the toys labelled as ingroup
• Also, one week later, they were able to remember more details about ingroup objects