Gender differentiation in children’s play: A sociocultural perspective.
Authors:   , Cabra Martina 
Published: September 2023

My PhD research explored gender differentiation in children’s play. We live in a time where gender equality constitutes a core issue in many institutions and countries’ political agendas (National Geographic, 2017; UN WOMEN, 2020; UNICEF, 2020). Across the fights and discussions for gender equality and women’s rights, two conceptual questions cut through debates: i) what is gender? and ii) where does it come from? In this work, I focused on gender in young children’s play. What interested me was to understand how comprehension, guidance and preference participate together and sometimes clash, in what a child can or cannot not do in relation to gender. Methodologically, I showed that focusing on play constitutes a spontaneously defined laboratory to look at the joint work of social constraints and psychological autonomy in development. The main research question addressed was: where do the differences in how children do gender come from? I explored several sub-questions: Where can we find gender in people’s lives? How does the social and material environment guide children’s interactions in relation to gender? What is the margin of freedom children have in its reconstruction? What defines this margin of freedom? Do children appropriate elements of the gender system? If so, is there some logic, typology or recurrent form in doing gender? Do children internalize the gender system? If so, what is the result of such a process? What are the stable aspects that result of gender construction in the life of a person? Answering these questions demands an approach that provides at the same time i) a definition of gender; ii) a way to study it; iii) tools to distinguish social and psychological dynamics; and iv) a model of its development. It is by combining a semiotic, developmental and sociocultural psychology with a performative approach to gender that I attempt to make sense of the development of gender. The main thesis of this work is to show that gender is a dynamic semiotic system children encounter, act within and internalize in different ways. In this sense, I argue and show that the gender system provides certain forms of social guidance, has particular normative weight, and the child evidences a certain margin of freedom in its reconstruction. The form of social guidance that the system provides frames the forms of doing gender. But as I show, gender development cannot be separated from people’s development of other modes of engaging with the world in general. The modes of combination the children construct to interact with the gender system are not specific to it and may speak to broader relational dynamics, as we will see in the parallel between family, school and children’s modes, and through the notion of psychological patterns. As such, one of the interesting findings of this thesis is the fact that the development of gender may not be separated from the child’s development in general, and it may be employed instrumentally, as it appears sometimes as a subcase of the way in which the child constructs her relationship to norms, to play and to others, in different situations. With these propositions, the work aimed to contribute to the fields of gender studies and sociocultural psychology and further research lines have been proposed.