Do Children Expect Boys and Girls to Be Rewarded Differently for Doing the Same Work?

Abstract

From a young age, children think resources ought to be distributed equally but expect resources to be shared preferentially with ingroup members. These desires for both impartiality and partiality take root in early childhood and likely become further entangled with age due to exposure to existing forms of group-based inequalities. Here, we ask whether children expect fairness or favoritism from an authority figure in the context of a real-world form of group-based inequality—the gender gap in pay. We tested 4- to 11-year-olds’ (N = 157) and adults’ (N = 101) expectations of how girls and boys would be rewarded by a teacher for performing a classroom task. Children were asked whether they expected a boy or girl to receive the larger reward (three versus two of five cookies) after completing a job. We found that 4- and 5-year-old children expected their own gender to be rewarded more favorably, an expectation that aligns with past work showing an own-gender bias in resource allocation. By contrast, and with the exception of 8- and 9-year-old boys, children in the 6- to 11-year-old range expected gender parity in pay, as did adults, a finding that contrasts with own-gender biases and with the real-world gender gap in pay. Our results shed new light on children’s evolving expectations of how rewards will be distributed in a context in which fairness and favoritism are in tension. Moreover, they provide a foray into children’s expectations about gender pay parity, an important and persistent issue in the society in which these children are developing.