The Role of Schools in the Early Socialization of Gender Differences

Schools are major contexts for gender socialization, in part because children spend large
amounts of time engaged with peers in such settings.4 For nearly all psychological traits
on which young boys and girls differ (e.g., reading ability, play preferences), the
distribution of the two groups is overlapping. Schools can magnify or diminish gender
differences by providing environments that promote within-gender similarity and
between-gender differences, or the inverse (within-gender variability and between group
similarity).

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