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Two preregistered studies investigated how children use gender labels and gendered appearances when making inductive inferences about unfamiliar individuals' gender-related attributes. Prior research on this question has yielded mixed results, motivating a closer examination. We assessed the relative weight children assign to these cues (labels vs. appearances) when predicting whether unfamiliar individuals will display masculine versus feminine attributes (e.g., playing with robots vs. dolls). Children ranked characters varying orthogonally in gender labels ("girl" vs. "boy") and gendered appearances (feminine vs. masculine) on their likelihood of exhibiting these attributes. Study 1 tested 4-5-year-olds (N = 46); Study 2 tested 7-12-year-olds (N = 140). Children treated both gender labels and gendered appearances as informative, even at the youngest ages. Appearances carried more weight in three key contexts: First, children relied more on appearances (vs. labels) when reasoning about individuals labeled "boy" (vs. "girl"), consistent with the stricter sanctions boys face for gender non-conformity in appearance, which makes the stereotypicality of their appearance an especially informative cue. Second, children relied more on appearances (vs. labels) when reasoning about feminine (vs. masculine) attributes, consistent with femininity's stronger cultural association with physical appearances. Third, children relied more on appearances (vs. labels) when they themselves were boys (vs. girls), perhaps reflecting boys' greater attunement to appearance cues given the stronger policing of their gender expression. These findings suggest that children integrate labels and appearances in their gender-based reasoning in ways that reflect a growing sensitivity to the broader societal context of gender.
Alton et al. (Mon,) studied this question.