Gender- Kohlberg

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• Children of this age label themselves and others as a boy or a girl, a man or a woman. This label is based on outward appearance only, such as hairstyle. Children will change the gender labels as appearances change. 

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• Children recognise that gender is something that is consistent over time, boys grow to men, and girls grow to women. Thus this gender concept is one of stability but it does not yet recognise consistency. They do not understand that gender is also consistent across situations, believing instead that males might change into females if they engage in female activities.

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• Conservation refers to the ability to understand that, despite superficial changes in appearance, basic properties if an object remain unchanged.At this age, children believe that a person must be a girl if they are wearing a dress. They lack the ability to conserve. For example, McConaghy found that when young children were shown a line drawing of a doll where the male genitals were visible through the doll's dress children under the age of five judged the doll to be female because of its external appearance despite the contrary evidence that it was a boy.

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• Children come to realise that gender is consistent across situations. Thus they have now developed full gender constancy. The key feature of this stage is that it is only at this point, when a child has acquired gender constancy, that they start to learn about gender-appropriate behaviour. Up until the stage of constancy such info is not really relevant because the child believes that his/her gender may change.

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• Thompson found that two year olds were 76% correct in identifying their sex, whereas three year olds were 90% correct. This shows an increasing ability to label themselves, as predicted by Kohlberg's theory.

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• Slab and Frey asked young children questions such as 'were you a little girl or a little boy when you were a baby?# and the answers given by children showed that they did not recognise that these traits were stable over time until they were three or four years old, as Kohlberg predicted.

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• They asked children a different set of questions, such as 'if you played football would you be a boy or a girl'. They found that children who scored high on both stability and consistency showed greatest interest in same-sex models. This suggests, as Kohlberg predicted, that an increasing sense of constancy leads children to pay more attention to gender appropriate models, furthering gender development.

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• Argues that genital knowledge rather than gender constancy lies at the root of gender development. To demonstrate this she showed children a picture of a toddler in the nude and then asked each child to identify the toddler's sex when dressed gender inappropritely and appropriately. She found that 40% of 3-5 year olds were capable of conserving gender. She then tested those children who didn't conserve gender and found that most of these also failed a genital knowledge test. Therefore what Kohlberg is somewhat invalid because he is testing the wrong thing to do with gender development.

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• Slab and Frey also found that boys tended to exhibit gender consistency before girls. This can be explained through SLT- the role models that boys identify with are more powerful. Boys are also more likely to be punished for gender inappropriate behaviour than girls and therefore learn gender appropriate behaviour more quickly.

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• GST suggests that children acquire info about gender appropriate behaviours before constancy is achieved,