Girls as Objects, Boys as Humans: Young Children Tend to Be Objectified Along Gender Lines

Objectification—the psychological phenomenon of relegating people to the status of objects, denying their humanness—is associated with a host of negative consequences for those targeted, from diminished cognitive performance to heightened risk of danger. Girls and women constitute the primary targets of objectification; thus, these harms fall disproportionately on them. Despite the persistence of such gendered patterns, however, it is not clear how they arise. That is, we do not yet know whether and to what extent perceivers objectify children along gender lines (i.e., associating girls with objects and boys with humans), thus limiting our grasp of this phenomenon both theoretically and practically. In the present studies, we addressed this gap on two fronts. First, we tested whether adults (n = 430) objectify young children based on gender. Second, we tested whether children themselves (n = 418, ages 4–10 years) display gendered patterns of objectification toward other children. We found evidence that adults objectify children based on gender: in both their categorizations and attributions, adults revealed overlap between their concepts of girls and objects and their concepts of boys and humans (although the degree to which each specific pattern manifested varied across studies). Children showed more limited evidence of this phenomenon: boys, but not girls, displayed the predicted pattern of conceptual overlap, and only in their categorizations. Together, these findings reveal that gender-differentiated patterns of objectification may take root in perceptions of young children—suggesting that the gendered consequences of this phenomenon may be larger in scope and earlier-emerging than previously assumed.