Gender Schema Theory

Synonyms

None

Introduction

Developed by Sandra Bem (1981, 1983), gender schema theory explains the development and consequences of sex typing or how children acquire sex-defined characteristics (i.e., preferences, skills, personality traits, behaviors, and self-concepts) that are aligned with gender. The theory aims to provide an understanding of how mental representations of gender develop in early childhood to influence attention, motivation, person perception, impression formation, and behavior.

General Description

Gender schema theory assumes that, from an early age, children naturally extract information from their social environments, which they then encode and organize into networks of mental associations that allow them to make sense of their worlds and themselves. In doing so, they develop schema or cognitive structures that represent information about the world and the self; these schema help organize information and guide perception, evaluation, and encoding of new...