Even children see a masculine world
Our biased view of the world begins at an early age. Even at kindergarten, children understand the masculine form as something specific, not generic. That applies particularly to girls.
Girls and boys come out to box? | Picture: Pascal Gygax et al. (2019)
When French speakers hear the word ‘musiciens’, they think automatically of male musicians, not of a group of men and women. This tendency is already anchored in early childhood. The research of Pascal Gygax, a psychologist at the University of Fribourg, has shown that children between the ages of three and five already assume that the masculine form of a word actually signifies men.
His team investigated how 52 French-speaking kindergarten children from Geneva and Lausanne dealt with the ambiguity of the grammatical masculine form. The researchers showed the children a series of paired drawings, one of which depicted two boys, the other a girl and a boy. They told the children: “look at the taxi drivers! (“les chauffeurs de taxi”) – “Look at the hairdressers!” (“les coiffeurs”) – “Look at the musicians!” (“les musiciens”). Each pair was depicted as belonging to the occupation in question. The researchers observed the eye movements of the children using an infrared eyetracker. In the case of stereotypically ‘male’ occupations, like taxi drivers, the children tended to glance at the picture with the two boys, while in the case of stereotypically ‘female’ occupations, such as hairdressers, they tended to look at the mixed couple. In the case of a neutral occupation, such as musicians, the grammatical gender was dominant. The children had not yet had any lessons in French grammar, and so had not learnt about masculine and feminine endings and adjectives. But they still understood the masculine form as something specific. “That isn’t very encouraging”, says Gygax. “It means that children already begin to have a biased view of society at this early age”. The tendency was especially strong among the girls. Gygax explains why: “Because they are normally addressed using the feminine form, the masculine form to them is the one that seems not to apply to them”.
