According to Yusuke Moriguchi, an associate professor at Kyoto University's Graduate School of Letters, et al. This was discovered through joint research by Osaka University, Otemon Gakuin University, and Sugiyama Jogakuen University.
According to Kyoto University, the research group recruited 4 children aged 7 to 220, told them stories about wise and kind people, and then had the children choose whether they were male or female.
As a result, girls tended to associate "kindness" with their gender more than boys at any age, which was different from the research results in the United States. There was no significant difference in "smartness" among children aged 4 to 6, but by the age of 7, boys tended to associate "smartness" with their own lives.The research group believes that the stereotype that "male = smart" emerges around the age of seven.
Furthermore, when a similar experiment was conducted on another 4 children between the ages of 7 and 345, the stereotype that "women = gentle" emerged around the age of 4, and the stereotype that "men = smart" emerged around the age of 7. was
Although Japan has made efforts to promote gender equality over the past several decades, women's participation in society lags behind in many fields such as politics, education, academia, and the economy.It has been pointed out that one of the factors behind this is the existence of stereotypes such as "men = smart" and "women = kind", but it has not been clarified when this occurred.
Paper information:[Scientific Reports] Gender stereotypes about intellectual ability in Japanese children