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Social Learning Theory of Gender Development
Gender Stereotypes are learned part through direct tuition. Fagot and leinbach (1989):- carried out a long term study on children. Parents encouraged gender appropriate behaviour and discouraged gender-inappropriate behaviour in their children even before the age of 2. For example, girls were rewarded for playing with dolls, and discouraged from climbing trees. Those parents who made the most use of directional tuition tended to have children who behaved most like the gender stereotyped way.
However these findings are not all together typical.
Lytton and Romney (1991) reviewed numerous studies on the parental treatment of boys and girls. There was a modest tendency for parents to encourage gender-stereotyped activities, but boys and girls received equal parental warmth, encouragement of achievement, discipline, and amount of interaction. Direct tuition is also used by other children. Fagot (1985) studied the behaviour of children aged between 21 and 25 months. Boys made fun of other boys who playing with a boy. There are similar pressures from their peers among older children in the years before adolescence. Those who fail to behave in gender-stereotyped way are the least popular (Sroufe et al 1993). Observational learning was studied by Perry and Bussey (1979). Children aged 8 or 9 watched male and female adult models choose between gender-neutral activities (e.g selecting an apple or pear). Afterwards, they tended to make the same choices as the same sex models. These findings suggest that observational learning plays an important role in gender development. However, Barkley et al (1977) reviewed the literature, and found that children showed a bias in favour of the same-sex models in only 18 out of 81 studies. Children between the ages of 4 and 11 watched three hours of television a day, which adds up to 1000 hours a year. It would be surprising if this exposure had no impact on children’s views of themselves and on gender stereotypes via observational learning. Most of the research indicates there is a modest link between television viewing habits of children aged 4 and 12. Those children who watched television tended to show more gender-stereotyped behaviour in terms of preferring gender-stereotyped toys. However, this is only correlation evidence, and so we do not know that watching television led to gender-stereotyped behaviour. Williams (1986) examined gender role stereotypes in three towns in Canada nicknamed: “Notel2 (No television channels); “Unitel” (one channel); and multitel (four channels). Gender-role stereotyping was much greater in the towns with television than in the one without. During the course of the study. Notel gained access to one television channel. This led to increased gender-role stereotypic among children. Some of the strongest evidence that television can influence gender development was reported by Johnston and Ettema (1982). In the freestyle project, there were a series of television programmes in which non-traditional opportunities and activities were modelled. There programmes produced significant attitude changes away from gender-role stereotypes, and these changes were still present 9 months later. However the effects on behaviour were rather small.
Evaluation One of the strengths of the social learning approach is that it takes full account of the social context in which the development of gender occurs. As social learning theorists have claimed, some gender-stereotyped behaviour occurs because it has been discouraged or punished there is also evidence that observational learning is important, but perhaps more with older than with younger children. There are several limitations of social learning theory. First, as Durkin (1995) pointed out.
Research into the effects of the principal mechanisms emphasised by the theory (parental reinforcement, modelling) has not led consistently to the conclusion that they have a major influence. Second, some aspects of social learning theory suggest that gender is passinely acquired through rewards and punishment. In reality, children make an acute contribution to their own development and this factor is recognised in later versions of social learning theory such as Bandura (1986) social cognitive theory, in which the emphasis is on the self and the role it plays in influencing behaviour. This is called social cognitive theory (Bussy and Bandura 1992)
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