ABSTRACT
In developmental psychology, we have traditionally seen gender development as a child’s acquisition of certain behaviors, preferences, and personality traits that are more typical of the child’s own sex than of the other sex. Thus for young children we have administered toy and activity preference tests, and when children choose the toys or activities that their own sex typically prefers, we say they are becoming sex-typed. For somewhat older children, in whom personality characteristics have become fairly well stabilized, we have looked for clusters of personality traits that are thought to distinguish the sexes. Thus a boy has been called sex-typed-that is, masculine-if he becomes assertive, energetic, competitive, and independent; a girl is sex-typed in so far as she becomes kind, empathic, responsible, and sensitive. There was a period of interest in androgyny-that is, in the idea that individuals could have the characteristics of both sexes, and were better off psychologically if they did. This work provided a counterweight to the more traditional assumption that becoming sex-typed was a normal, expected, and indeed, healthy aspect of development.
