The gender biases that shape our brains - BBC News

If from infancy, boys are discouraged from playing with toys we might associate as feminine, then they may not develop a skill set that they might need later in life. If they are discouraged by their peers from playing with dolls, while at the same time they see their mother doing most of the childcare, what does that say about whose role it is to care? And so we enter the realm of "biological essentialism", where we ascribe an innate basis to a behaviour that is, when you delve a bit deeper, highly likely to be learned.

Toys are one thing, but traits are also prone to gendered stereotyping. Parents of boys often talk about how they are more boisterous and enjoy rougher play, while girls are more gentle and meek. The evidence suggests otherwise.

In fact, studies show that our own expectations tend to frame how we view others and ourselves. Parents have attributed gender neutral angry faces as boys while happy and sad faces are labelled as girls. Mothers are more likely to emphasise their boys' physical attributes – even setting more adventurous targets for boys than for girls. They also over-estimate crawling abilities for their sons compared to daughters, despite there being no reported physical difference. So, people's own biases could be influencing their children, and so reinforcing these stereotypes.

Language plays a powerful role too – girls reportedly speak earlier, a small but identifiable effect but this could be due to the fact that research also shows that mothers speak more to their baby girls than to baby boys. They speak more about emotions to girls too. In other words, we unknowingly socialise girls to believe they are more talkative and emotional, and boys aggressive and physical.

Brown explains that it's clear why these misconceptions then continue later in life. We disregard the behaviours that do not conform to the stereotypes we expect. "So you overlook all the times the boys are sitting there quietly reading a book or all the times that girls are running around the house loudly," she says. "Our brains seem to skip over what we call stereotype inconsistent information."