Call that a gender-based assumption?

At the weekend, the Guardian "Weekend" magazine ran a feature titled "Call that a job?" Three examples in particular interested me, involving very young children and indicating tropes surrounding gender identity and the ways in which gender is understood by adults and learned by children.

These columnists were fashion editor Jess Cartner-Morley (whose "replacement" was daughter Pearl, aged 4), beauty writer Sali Hughes (whose "replacements" were sons Marvin and Arthur, aged 5 and 3) and music critic Alexis Petridis (whose "replacement" was daughter Esme, 4).   Each columnist gave an introduction explaining what they felt about the experience of inviting their children to help with their job for a day.

Sali Hughes writes about the experience that:

Every morning we have a ritual where I sit on my bed and put on my make-up while my sons, Marvin, almost six, and Arthur, three-and-a-half, watch television next to me. Whereas I would sit transfixed as my grandmother applied her rouge and Yardley perfume, my kids barely look up from Scooby-Doo.

As a mother of sons and a feminist, I was keen to avoid gender stereotyping but, as any parent will tell you, there's a certain hardwiring, whether or not you indulge it. When I'm filming my beauty tutorials, they head straight for the camera equipment.

However, she immediately observes that:

Arthur loves having his toenails painted ... and yet Marvin, just 28 months his senior, is already horrified at the suggestion. It was only two years ago that I was shrieking at him for raiding my make-up bag and covering himself, and my white bedsheets in pink creme blusher. Now he'd sooner eat slime.

The question that springs to mind is, "What happens between the ages of 3-and-a-half and nearly 6?" One pretty major answer, in the UK, is that you start going to school. And peer pressure becomes a factor. Anyone who says peer pressure doesn't start from day one of school is living with rose-tinted memories. However well feminist parents teach non-gender, if their children are aware of having gender, then gender norms will be imposed on them by the children of people who are not raising their children with feminism in mind. Not to mention the attitudes and influences of the more gender-norm-enforcing teachers at their school. As the famous saying puts it, it akes a whole village to raise a single child.

Sali Hughes' assertion that gendered differences are something "hardwired" also seems dubious when we look at the attitudes of 4-year-old Pearl, who was playing as a fashion writer for the day

Pearl's mother, Jess Cartner-Morley, reports that Pearl's attitude was:

"I'm quite busy after school. I haven't finished my colouring"

"But it will be fun! You can choose clothes for us to wear, and we'll be in the magazine together."

"Mummy, that's not very fun. Going on roller-coasters is fun. Eating popcorn and cake is fun. Choosing clothes is not really fun."

"There's a shop where I work that sells cake. We could go there afterwards."

Pause

"Do I have to have my hair brushed or try any new vegetables?"

"No. I promise."

"OK, Mummy."

Pearl, also before school age (although it's possible she might have been going to playschool or kindergarten), seems gloriously unaware that as a girl, she's supposed to love clothes shopping, being groomed (having her hair brushed) and such things! That said, Jess tells us that, "...she has recently outgrown the nylon princess dress phase. (Three months ago, I would have been turened into a dead ringer for Grayson Perry.)"

Again, we have a point of comparison by age and gender. Pearl's brother, aged 8, is assumed to have a different perspective:

But if it were up to Alfie, my eight-year-old, I would be wearing an Arsenal home kit and an Arsenal away kit. So it falls to Pearl.

Again, why might an eight-year-old boy think the only thing to be seen wearing is a football strip for one's favoured team? Can it really be hardwired, or is it something about how one learns (and is expected) to display one's sense of belonging and one's place in life? Similarly, women are taught other ways to show their allegiance and their station.

Alexis Petridis, the music critic, talks of doing his best not to force his parental interests on his children, and bemoans the tendency for others to seek to influence directly the music chosen by their kids. He writes that, "part of the joy of discovering music as a child is finding it for yourself, independent of or, better still, contrary to your parents' wishes."

Nevertheless, he seems happy with most of 4 years old Esme's choices, with the exception of a track by Katy Perry (namely, California Gurls), of which he writes:

It isn't just that Perry appears to make records with the specific intention of annoying me - audibly cynical and dead-eyed, it'sa pop music made by people who hate pop music and those who like it. It's that she makes records that hymn things I don't want my kids - both girls - to grow up thinking are cool: honking lads mag faux-lesbianism; using the word 'gay' as an insult; the disconcerting combination of lollipop-sucking ickle-girl-isms and décolleté sexuality. Yet you don't want to be one of those huffy numpties who picketed the Anarchy In The UK tour, convinced that their children's sense of morality would be irrevocably shattered if they saw the Sex Pistols live.

I needn't have worried: if you can't over-estimate a four-year-old's capacity for listening to the same thing over and over again, nor can you over-estimate their capacity for dropping it like a hot brick when something else comes along.

Alexis seems to have some of the right intentions, but more importantly, seems to have a slightly better idea of how gendered socialisation starts and works. Both that it comes about from social constructions (Katy Perry) and that it is not necessarily direct or immediate (both the remark about the "threat" of the Sex Pistols, and observing that Esme at the age of 4 is not absorbing too many messages from Katy Perry yet but instead losing interest very quickly as soon as something else comes along).

This is not to say that gender programming holds off until children reach school age, and it is not to say that earlier influences are unimportant - but it does say that they are far harder to track, and they are clearly not based in some form of "hardwiring" that determines that between the age of 3 and 6 boys automatically lose interest in make-up and clothing, even if they liked it before.

The question that bothers me is how four-year-olds Esme and Pearl will find themselves gendered and socialised when they start at school. The articles weren't meant to be about gender differences and how they emerge, and there were no examples of early school age girls to compare with these pre-school girls, as we were able to compare Alfie and Marvin with Arthur. So we don't get to see if Pearl's boredom with clothes and hair might suddenly turn into avid interest when peer pressure becomes a factor.

Either way, I have always disliked seeing the defeatist attitude of some "feminist mothers" like Sali Hughes that, when they find their sons like "typically" boy-ish things or their daughters like "typically" girly things, it must mean that there are after all some biological imperatives that cannot be overcome; and that the best feminism can do is fight to even the balance once they have followed their gendered destiny. I have so often read about feminists who believed they could raise their children free from stereotyping but then found that it didn't work that way. For one thing - a certain percentage of children will, even free of gendered programming, choose "stereotypical" interests anyway. And, as I've already explained, it isn't only the family that produces the child, but so much depends on the socialisation received outside the home, from friends, television and at school. To declare, because the parents weren't able to overcome the weight of all that other programming, that gender is innate after all seems to me to be somewhat short of the methodical approach that leads to understanding.

It is, however, exceptionally hard for us to escape in society.

EDIT TO ADD: Another point of reference on these issues is Matt Kailey's piece over at Womanist Musings about the young child Storm being raised without gender prompting from parents.