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Theories of gender socialization are derived from general theories of socialization that propose that the child is taught or trained in how to be a competent member of society. This model of socialization, derived from functionalism in sociology, proposes that the child moves from the family to the outside world, gradually learning and internalizing the behaviours necessary to function in society (Corsaro 2005: 8). An alternative model of socialization criticized functionalism for its conservative perspective, arguing that it was only functional to some members of society and that a smooth transition of existing norms reproduced inequalities. One of the most influential critiques of functional sociology can be found in the research of Pierre Bourdieu, a French socialist, who proposed the concept of the habitus to describe how children through the constant repetition of small everyday actions, like eating and talking, come to feel at home in some spaces and not others, and claimed that this effectively reproduced class-based inequalities (Bourdieu 1990).

Whereas these theories of socialization are about how children learn a whole range of roles and practices, the idea of gender socialization uses the same models but only focuses on one aspect: socialization into appropriate or socially sanctioned gender roles. Gender role socialization assumes that ‘individuals observe, imitate, and eventually internalize the specific attitudes and behaviors that the culture defines as gender appropriate by using other males and females as role models’ (Hill 2002: 494, citing Ickes 1993: 79).

Parents’ responses to their children are regarded as one of the most important, and certainly earliest, sites where this gets done. The classic study by Rubin, Provenzano and Luria (1974), which found that parents assign characteristics to new-borns on the basis of the child’s gender and in the absence of real physical differences, has been replicated by several subsequent studies. Parents’ essentialism about gender (the belief that gender is a natural category which has innate associations with behaviour and attitudes) has been shown in a correlational study to predict their children’s gender-typed preferences (Meyer and Gelman 2016). Subsequent studies in the USA have confirmed that parents do not (or do not believe they) parent girls and boys differently (Mesman and Groeneveld 2018: 22).

Despite the evidence that parents in the USA do not explicitly parent in gender-normative ways, which is congruent with a discourse that social structures like gender and race do not determine individual’s life chances, other studies have shown that parents give both direct and indirect messages to their children about gender roles. This may involve gendering toys (that is, suggesting explicitly or implicitly that some toys are for girls and other toys are for boys) (Fisher-Thompson 1993; Seiter 1995); encouraging boys to be risk-takers and girls to be nice to others (Meyer and Gelman 2016); the distribution of household chores (Cordero-Coma and Esping-Andersen 2018); or the way that their bedrooms are decorated (MacPhee and Prendergast 2019). When families have limited budgets ‘parents are more likely to invest in developmentally enhancing activities for sons than for daughters’ (McHale et al. 2003: 133).

There is also a good deal of empirical evidence that children have different experiences with their fathers and with their mothers and that these differences are significant for children’s gendered socialization. Leaper et al. (1998) found that mothers talk more to their children but are also more negative in their talk than fathers are. Some studies have found that the differences in how fathers and mothers interact with their children are reduced if mothers work longer hours and fathers are then more involved in daily family life; that is, if there is a more gender-equal distribution of care in the home. However, an ethnography of how the migration of Filipino women has impacted on gender roles in the family as fathers are left to care for their children found that gender norms were not undermined and in fact were strengthened (Parreñas 2005).