Children’s Decision-Making About Others Reflects Gender Stereotypes More Than Race

When categorizing faces by gender, children show evidence of intersectionality—miscategorizing Black females, but not White females, as male. Here we examined whether differential biases for Black and White females extend beyond perceptual tasks to judgments of social preferences. Children (N = 97, ages 4–9 years; 59.8% White and 40.2% Non-white) evaluated and endorsed gender-stereotyped clothing and activity choices for unfamiliar Black and White boys and girls. We found that children held robust gender stereotypes—evaluating female-stereotyped options more positively for girls and male-stereotyped options more positively for boys, regardless of race. More specifically, children’s judgments of Black and White girls did not differ significantly for either clothing or activity choices. A small race effect emerged in activity evaluations, with White faces rated more positively than Black faces; however, this effect did not interact with gender, and diminished with age. These findings suggest that although 4- to 9-year-olds are sensitive to both the gender and race of unfamiliar children, intersectionality effects for Black females are not present at this age when evaluating social preferences—a result that contrasts with findings from perceptual categorization tasks. Potential explanations for the absence of intersectionality in children’s decision-making are discussed.