Gender Role Socialisation: How Family, School and Media Teach It

What Gender Roles Are

Sociology is careful to separate terms that everyday language often blurs together. Sex is a biological fact: the reproductive system and secondary traits such as height or muscle mass. Gender, by contrast, is a social category: the set of behaviours, personal traits and positions a society assigns to being a woman or a man. Gender identity is the internal, personal sense a person has of their own gender. Gender role, finally, is the set of social expectations about how men and women should look and behave — a concept distinct from both sex and gender identity.

According to sociology textbooks, learning a gender role starts right from birth. Gender socialisation, in that sense, is one specific chapter inside a wider topic, how a person enters the rules of their own society: the channels stay the same — home, classroom, friends, screen — what changes is the object being watched, the expectations tied to gender.

The Family

The first agent, according to the textbooks, is the family. A frequently cited study, by Caldera, Huston and O’Brien (1998), found that children choose toys seen as “fitting their own gender” more often even when toys associated with the other gender are also available: the authors link that choice to how parents respond, with praise, involvement and physical closeness, to behaviour that matches gender expectations.

Practical example: according to the cited source, parents tend to give boys vehicles, action figures and sports gear more often, and girls dolls, kitchen sets and costumes more often — a distinction that covers both the toy chosen and how actively parents encourage it.

The same source also flags a change over time: in recent decades, adults have grown more likely to hold egalitarian views on gender, with more variation among today’s parents than in the past. One detail specific to the US context, cited by the OpenStax textbook, adds a nuance: according to a 2004 study by Staples and Boulin Johnson, Black families in the United States are more likely than White American families to raise children with an egalitarian model of family roles — a finding tied to that specific context.

School and Peers

At school, a 1994 study by Sadker and Sadker observed similar dynamics: boys got far more praise from teachers than girls did, were interrupted less often, and had more room to develop their own ideas. The textbook adds a general observation: girls are usually given more latitude to step outside the prescribed gender role than boys are.

The peer group is the third of the four agents sociology textbooks list for gender socialisation; the studies gathered here mostly concern family, school and media.

The Media

Content aimed at children shows recurring gender patterns. Smith reviewed, in 2008, ten G-rated children’s films that topped the US box office between 1991 and 2013: in that group, out of ten characters counted, nine were male. Davis, in 1993, found that women appear almost exclusively in television advertising for cooking, cleaning or childcare products.

A more recent line of research looks at children’s picture books. Zhou, Guo, Liu, Sun and Zhang analysed, in 2026, 148 books drawn from Chinese Ministry of Education reading lists, children’s literature awards and an early-reading catalogue: research carried out on children’s books in China, not generalisable to other countries. In that sample, male figures more often appear alone on the cover and in outdoor scenes; female figures appear more often doing housework, in both categories of books analysed (by Chinese and non-Chinese authors). In titles by Chinese authors, male characters cover 19.2% of the coded social-interaction instances against 13.4% for female characters; in titles by non-Chinese authors the gap narrows, 17.0% against 16.0% in favour of female characters. The research also cites earlier studies, carried out between 1972 and 2024 in different cultural contexts, documenting the overrepresentation of male characters in titles, in the lead role and in the illustrations of children’s books.

Readers who want to judge for themselves how representative sources like these are, before generalising from them, can start with the criteria set out in media literacy.

One Mechanism Inside a Larger Process

The same pattern traced in this Recap — family, school, peers, media — is the one sociology uses to describe socialisation in general, applied here to a single aspect: gender. The Recap on social status and role shows how, more broadly, a social status gives rise to a recognised role without needing a written contract: a gender role is one specific case of that, tied to the gender a person is perceived as rather than to a position they have earned.