Wakefield Study

In April 2024 I conducted a series of interviews with the first-grade class at Wakefield School in The Plains. I sat down with each of them and asked them a dozen questions and asked them to draw a few things at a later time. Data was collected that solidified the argument of nature or nurture when discussing fundamental preferences and aspirations in young children. The children were asked a series of questions about their preferences including the color of their room, their favorite thing to learn in school, their favorite game, and what they wanted to be when they grew up. Later, they were also asked to draw what they thought a hairdresser, a scientist, a babysitter, and a fireman looked like. No other instruction was given. The children were allowed to answer and draw as freely as they chose and were not allowed to help other classmates come up with ideas of what to draw.

In the questionnaire, the children’s answers regarding their favorite subject and their favorite game were largely the same, regardless of gender. However, the answer to the question “What do you want to be when you grow up?” was linked to the older people surrounding them. Out of the fourteen responses received from this question, seven of the children answered with a profession that was associated with their parents or their sibling’s interests. Four of the students who did not have an answer associated with their families’ professions or interests claimed to want to be a teacher. At the impressionable age of first-graders, they spend seven hours out of the day with their teacher. The teacher has a great amount of influence on the children they teach because of the amount of time that they spend with them

Throughout the interview process with the first-graders, I learned that there was already a divide between genders that did not relate to academics in any way. One of the questions that I had asked was “Who are your friends in school?” All of the children came up with at least two friends to list, however, the boys seemed to list the most amount of names compared to the girls. The boys listed on average about 4.5 names when asked the question while the girls listed an average of 3 names. The boys were also more inclined to list both genders as their friends. In this first-grade class, 100% of the male students listed at least one girl as a friend, while only one girl listed a boy as their friend when asked this question. As it appears in this study, the division of sexes happens before the males are even aware of it.

I had thought that division had not reached much else besides friendships and favorite colors until I received the drawings from the children. Some of the drawings I received were small, scribbled, and done only in pencil. Some of the drawings were large, detailed, and full of color. Almost all of the drawings held true to a trend that I was pleasantly surprised by. When drawing a hairdresser, most of the children drew a female or a figure with long hair except for a few boys who drew a male. When drawing a firefighter only three students drew a female figure and all three of those students were female. These answers were what I expected them to be. Hairdressers and firefighters have deeply entrenched gender biases so I assumed that most of the children would adhere to that. However, I also guessed that a few children of the opposite gender of the assumed gender stereotype of either profession might have drawn a figure closely resembling themselves. When asked to draw a scientist, 40% of the students in total drew a male figure conducting experiments and 50% of the male students drew a female figure.

When asked to draw a doctor, every student except one drew a female figure. This was not at all what I was expecting. I had hypothesized that the majority of students would draw male figures for both the scientists and doctors. Both of these professions have been heavily male-dominated since the creation of professions. Women are slowly gaining ground and their rate of employment is rising. In an article from the AAMC, it states “Tcstudents (50.5%) were women” (Boyle). I believe that the reason the majority of the children drew female doctors was because of the growing female presence in family medicine, and since the establishment of Title IX in 1972, women have received less discrimination and pushback when entering the workforce in a male-dominated field. Regardless of the reason, seeing that boys and girls alike did not let their imaginations succumb to the well-established gender stereotypes was a promising sign of future progress. With more women being employed in professions such as medicine, children are less likely to be influenced by old stereotypes and traditional gender roles.