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CHAPTER 1

Introduction

I

n 1998, my daughter was born and so was my own personal experience with the

psychology of gender. As an advocate of equal opportunities and equal treatment

for men and women, I thought this practice should begin with infancy. To start,

my husband and I tried not to let gender be the overriding principle by which we chose

Katja’s toys and clothes. This proved to be far more difficult than we thought. In in-

fancy, there are a fair number of “gender-neutral” clothes and toys. But by 1 year of

age, the boys’ toys and clothes are in one section, the girls’ in another, and there is little

common ground. I finally figured out why there are gender-neutral clothes for infants:

Many parents-to-be and gift givers make purchases before the baby is born and don’t

know the sex of the newborn. By age 1, everyone knows.

By dressing Katja in gender-neutral clothes, I learned that the default assumption

of others was she must be a boy. Any infant girl in her right mind (or her parents’ right

mind) would wear pink or ruffles or have bows in her hair (see Figure 1.1) or have her

ears pierced!

Because I personally dislike pink (probably not a coincidence), Katja had a lot of

blue, yellow, purple, and red. (This did come back to haunt me around age 4 when pink

emerged as her favorite color! However, it lasted only a year and now she detests pink.

It must be genetic.) When we carried her around as an infant, people in the grocery

store or the shopping mall would comment on what a cute boy we had. When we men-

tioned he was a she, people often subtly reprimanded us for not providing the appro-

priate cues: the pink, the ruffles, the hair bows. Some people remarked that of course

she was a girl because she had so much hair. I know of no evidence that girls are born

with more hair than boys. I found it an interesting paradox that the biological default

is female (i.e., at conception, the embryo is destined to become female unless exposed

to male hormones), but the social default is male. When in doubt, assume the baby is

a boy—unless there are strong social cues indicating the baby is a girl. It is not nearly

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