SCRIPTS AND GENDER - A NEW APPROACH FOR EXAMINING GENDER-ROLE DEVELOPMENT

What are some major social cognitive and cognitive developmental mechanisms affecting young children′s early acquisition of gender-roles and their performance of gender-typed behaviors? Investigation of young children′s knowledge and understanding of gender scripts provides an innovative means for addressing such questions, as well as tying together distinct areas of early social cognitive development. The present paper examines relations between young children′s script, gender-role, and gender schema development and details current research on gender scripts. Tenets from the script model of event representations and gender schema models of early gender-role development are described and collectively applied to the study of children′s gender script understanding. New ways for conceptualizing and explaining aspects of early gender-role and gender schema development are presented. © 1993 Academic Press. All rights reserved.