Guide to Effective Programs
for Children and Youth

Interactive Intervention to Teach Children to Confront Peers’ Sexist Remarks

OVERVIEW

This interactive intervention is designed to teach children to confront peers’ sexist remarks and consists of six lessons that target six specific types of sexist remarks. An experimental evaluation of the intervention found that participants were more likely than peers to challenge sexist remarks at an immediate post-test, but these impacts faded by the six-month follow-up. Impacts on gender-typing of self and others were mixed.

DESCRIPTION OF PROGRAM

Target population: Elementary-school children

This interactive intervention is designed to teach children to confront peers’ sexist remarks, defined as “any remark that conveys or promotes the belief that biological sex is an appropriate basis on which to constrain individuals’ behavior, traits, or roles.”

The intervention is conducted in groups and consists of six lessons. Each lesson is focused on one type of sexist remark. In each lesson, children are taught one phrase that can be used to respond to the targeted type of sexist remark. At the beginning of the lesson, children are taught the phrase and practice it until they can repeat it verbatim. When all children can repeat the phrase verbatim, they are divided into small groups and asked to create skits that include a sexist remark and the retort phrase. Children take turns playing the different roles and, at the end of the lesson, each group presents their skit to the class. Older students (ages 7 to 10) are also asked to write down the retort phrase, in order to further reinforce their learning. The six types of sexist remarks and the retorts taught are listed below.

Type of Sexist Remark	Retort Phrase
Gender-based exclusion from peer interaction (e.g., “Only boys can play this game”)	“You can’t say that boys [girls] can’t play!”
Role-based biases (e.g., “You can’t be the doctor, you have to be the nurse”)	“Not true, gender doesn’t limit you!”
Comments about a child’s counter-stereotypic characteristics (e.g., “Why do you have a boy’s haircut?”)	“There’s no such thing as a girls’ [boys’] ____ !”
Comparative judgments (e.g., “Boys are better at math than girls”)	“Give it a rest, no group is best!”
Trait stereotyping (e.g., “Girls are gentle”)	“I disagree! Sexism is silly to me!”
Highlighting gender in a neutral context (e.g., “Boys sit over here and girls sit over there”)	“That’s weird, being boys and girls doesn’t matter here!”

EVALUATION(S) OF PROGRAM

Evaluated population: The evaluation sample consisted of 153 students (81 boys and 72 girls) enrolled in a private elementary school in the southwest United Stated. The student body of the school is 69 percent European American, 13 percent Latino, 9 percent African American, and 9 percent other. Participants were between five and 10 years old, with the average age being seven years and six months.

Approach: Classrooms were randomly assigned to the interactive intervention or a narrative intervention that presented the same themes described above through children’s stories. More information on the narrative intervention can be found here.

Children were assessed on gender stereotyping of others, personal gender-typing, and hypothetical responses to sexist comments in vignettes at pre-test, post-test, and the six-month follow-up. At post-test, children’s actual responses to sexist comments were observed using a confederate child who made a sexist comment while an out-of-sight researcher observed.

Results: At post-test, children in the interactive condition were significantly more likely to challenge sexist remarks in the hypothetical vignettes. They were also more likely to challenge sexist comments made by the confederate child. When compared to children in the practice condition, children in the narrative condition showed more interest in both feminine and masculine items. There was no significant difference between conditions on gender-typing of others.

At the six-month follow-up, there were no longer significant differences between conditions in children’s response to sexist remarks or children’s gender-typing of self. However, there was an impact for gender-typing of others: girls in the interactive condition held more egalitarian beliefs than girls in the narrative condition. There was no difference between boys in each condition. There were no significant differences between conditions on gender-based preferences for activities and occupations.

The researchers hypothesized that the impact on challenging sexist remarks faded by the six month follow-up because narrative group children learned the targeted retorts from their peers. This possibility was informed by the fact that several children in the narrative group repeated the targeted phrases verbatim at the six-month assessment even though they were never asked to memorize them.

SOURCES FOR MORE INFORMATION

References

Lamb, L. M., Bigler, R. S., Liben, L. S., & Green, V. A. (2009). Teaching children to confront peers’ sexist remarks: Implications for theories of gender development and educational practice. Sex Roles, 61, 361-382.

KEYWORDS: children (3-11), elementary, males and females (co-ed), white/Caucasian, school-based, skills training, other social/emotional health

Program information last updated 11/09/11.