How children react to gender stereotyping - an experiment in Gujarat

Children were asked how boys and girls cry, sit, laugh, stand, walk and dance

Boys don’t cry. Sit like a lady. Barbie for girls and Lego for boys. These are seemingly innocuous adages that generations of people have grown up with. But is it really that innocent or well-meaning?

It is not just that girls are supposed to wear pink; they should also play with toy vacuum cleaners and learn to relate to fluffy, cuddly animals. Boys, on the other hand, are supposed to wear blue and have rugged adventures.

Most people never learn to question these inflexible binaries and end up replicating them in every aspect of their lives. When a little girl is being given a toy vacuum cleaner and a little boy is being given a NASA tee shirt, people tell them what they expect of them: the girl to become a homemaker and the boy to aspire to become an astronaut.

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This is not simply a difference in roles – it is a hierarchised difference. There is no doubt in peoples’ mind that an astronaut is a harder thing to become compared to someone who can vacuum a house.

Community Correspondent Daxaben Punjabhai from Gujarat, one of the less developed states of India, set out to explore how children there relate to gender stereotypes imbibed from their families and surroundings. She asked them to perform how girls and boys act in various situations: how do boys cry, laugh, sit, stand, walk and dance? And how do girls do the same? Their responses are not as uniform as one might expect, as seen in the video below.

Sometimes gender difference is only limited to the sartorial: boys don the dupatta (scarf) to indicate they are now acting in a feminine role. Girls wear sunglasses and a hat when they are enacting masculine roles.

However, a clear difference emerges between the two genders when they are asked to show the difference in sitting, standing, walking and dancing, whereas they cry and laugh in a somewhat similar fashion. Both boys and girls think that when girls sit, they do so in postures that are markedly ‘feminine’: a hand on the cheek, primly folded legs. When boys sit, there’s casual masculine insouciance radiating from them: hands crossed over the chest authoritatively, or legs spread comfortably apart.

Asked to imitate how boys sit, both girls and boys struck authoritative postures.

Girls are supposed to sashay like they are on the ramp when they walk. Boys have a definite swagger, upturned collars and often wear goggles (apparently).

Stereotypes dictate that girls are supposed to sashay like they are on the ramp when they walk.

The most marked difference is in how boys and girls are perceived to dance. Girls are demure, mostly using a dupatta, and their dance moves are limited to hand movements and saying hips.

The girls think that boys, on the other hand, only perform the Punjabi bhangra – uninhibited and an exhibition of joyous exuberance. Boys themselves think that their dance moves must show how physically able they are – they turn cartwheels and do complicated breakdance moves.