Guide to Effective Programs
for Children and Youth

Narrative Intervention to Teach Children to Confront Peers’ Sexist Remarks

OVERVIEW

This intervention is designed to teach children to confront peers’ sexist remarks and consists of six lessons that target six specific types of sexist remarks through children’s stories. An experimental evaluation of the intervention found that participants showed more interest in both feminine and masculine items, but were less likely to challenge sexist remarks than the peers who participated in an interactive intervention at post-test. These differences were not significant at the six month follow-up.

DESCRIPTION OF PROGRAM

Target population: Elementary-school children

This narrative 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 focuses on one type of sexist remark. In each lesson, children are read two stories. In the first story, a child directs sexist remarks toward a peer, and the peer responds with one of the designated retorts. After they hear the story, children are asked to draw a picture of their favorite part. The six types of sexist remarks and retorts contained in the stories are listed below. The second story involves a bullying situation based on a social category other than gender (e.g., race or nationality). After reading the story, the adult leading the intervention reviews the behaviors used by the story characters to confront bullying and stresses the importance of addressing bullying.

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 States. 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 ten years old, with the average age being seven years and six months.

Approach: Classrooms were randomly assigned to the narrative intervention or an interactive intervention that required children to memorize the phrases listed above and practice using them in skits. More information on the interactive 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 narrative condition showed more interest in both feminine and masculine items than children in the interactive condition. However, children in the narrative condition were significantly less likely to challenge sexist remarks in the hypothetical vignettes. They were also less likely to challenge sexist comments made by the confederate child. There was no significant difference between conditions on gender-typing of others.

At the six-month follow-up, there were no 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.

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.