U.S. Children Expect and Approve of Adults’ Gender Stereotypes

Gender stereotypes, such as the idea that boys are more interested than girls in STEM,contribute to gender disparities in STEM. Do young children generally expect adults to holdsuch stereotypes, or do they withhold these assumptions without sufficient proof? Acrossfour preregistered experiments (n = 574), we found evidence for the former: 5- to 7-year-oldchildren in the United States predicted that teachers meeting their students for the first timewould assign engineering activities to boys and reading activities to girls, despite childrenknowing that the students liked both equally. Further, children approved of teachers assigningengineering activities only to boys and reading activities only to girls, more so than the reverse.Despite ongoing efforts to challenge gender disparities in education, our results reveal thatchildren enter school expecting teachers to hold gender stereotypes and view this as acceptable,highlighting a new early obstacle to educational equity.