The Effects of Gender Bias on Elementary School Children

The Effects of Gender Bias on Elementary School Children

“It’s a girl!” or “It’s a boy!” is typically the first thing parents hear after the birth of a child. This simple statement of fact sets the groundwork for every interaction they will have with their daughter or son, and for every experience that child will have throughout her or his life. Gender identity—the private experience of being female or male—forms a core part of one’s sense of self (Welker). The nature of this private experience is enormously influenced by what we are taught it means to be a girl or a boy, and these lessons are typically fraught with instances of gender bias—what Beverly Stitt, author of Building Gender Fairness in Schools, defines as “a set of beliefs or attitudes that indicates a primary view or set of expectations about peoples’ abilities and interests according to their sex” (Stitt 3). We are educated in this way first by our family members and then, beginning at a very tender age, by the mass media.

By the time children enter kindergarten, they have assimilated the transmitted sex stereotypes and accept gender discrimination as the norm. The school often encourages this accommodation by exposing the child for thirteen years to a “hidden curriculum” of gender inequality, imparted by instructors who do little to alleviate its effects. The result is that generation after generation of women are prohibited from reaching their full potential as individuals and as members of society. In this nation, education was once regarded as the great equalizer that made the circumstances of one’s birth irrelevant to one’s ability to prosper. Beginning in the primary school, we must teach and practice sexual equality.

As Andrew Windass,...

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