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Adult and Peer Social Interactions During Preschool Activity: A Combination for Gender Segregation?

Evidence suggests that gender segregation begins early in life, and becomes a dominant social fact for childhood and beyond. The phenomenon of segregation starts before three years of age, and seems to accelerate through middle childhood. One of the remarkable things about this differentiation is that it seems to occur naturally during the everyday activity of children. In this paper we attempt to explore some possible root causes of this gender segregation. We observed adult/child and child/ child social interactions in a preschool classroom that might normally be considered pre‐gender segregation or early gender segregation (30‐42 months of age). The observations were conducted during two distinctly different types of preschool activities: adult/mentor dominated activities (i.e., circle time) and peer culture dominated activities (i.e., free playtime). Analysis and coding of observations suggests that adult/child social interactions were very different for interactions initiated by females and those initiated by males. These differences played out in child/child social interactions during free playtime. We hypothesize that these early activities may help in setting the trajectory for gender defined social interactions that lead to segregation.