My son, Solly, is a lad. He is such a typical little bloke. Look at him smashing down that tower of bricks; he is so cheeky, a proper boy. These are the types of things people often say about Solly. And my husband, Robin, and I have found ourselves joining in.
Solly is a very physical child and plays fearlessly. He is almost three and loves diggers and football. Robin and I will watch him, next to girls of his age playing with crayons and puzzles in a much more focused way than he does, and it can be difficult not to come to the seemingly obvious conclusion: boys will be boys.
Solly also loves his rainbow leggings. He only recently started showing preferences for clothes and, given the choice, he always goes for the most bright and colourful option. Solly is also tender and sweet with babies. As with all children, it is impossible to know how much of his personality and preferences are due to his sex, or the way gendered expectations have already shaped him.
I am an investigative journalist at The Times, an author, and a gay dad through altruistic surrogacy in the UK. My husband and I became parents to Solly on the first day of the first lockdown in March 2020.
Before I became a parent, I would have said that society was getting better at not imposing gendered stereotypes. But you have a child, and it is like you are instantly transported to the 1950s.
It feels like the biggest cliché to spell it out. Why do boys equal blue and girls equal pink? Why are toys organised in shops by gender? Why do parents put baby girls in dresses that literally stop them being able to crawl or climb?
I write this, and yet I also would have dressed a daughter in a dress occasionally and I never would have done so with Solly. Why? I would not have painted Solly’s room pink. Why? This nonsense is ingrained, and it takes effort to resist it.
The relentless gender stereotyping after having children also applies to adults and parenting roles. Repeatedly, throughout the past three years, Robin and I have been struck by how little society still expects of men when it comes to childcare.
I have many female colleagues and friends who are very successful professionally. But they also always get the nursery calls and are expected to be the parent at their children’s medical appointments. They are much more likely than their partners to cut their hours of work after children.
Yes, biology means that women carry and give birth to babies, and some breastfeed. But why should that mean that they carry most of the responsibility for raising their children long term, even when they have a partner and want to share the duties as well as the love?
Over the past three years, I have been working on a book, The Equal Parent, to explore the truths behind the lazy assumptions we can all find ourselves making about gender and parenting instincts and roles. One of the key conclusions I have come to is that the inequality that we still see in the way men and women split parental responsibility is rooted in our children’s earliest experiences of what it means to be a boy or a girl.
These influences in childhood may seem harmless, but research suggests the opposite. When children are pushed towards stereotypes – the building toys just for boys and pretty princess games for girls – it restricts their imaginations and shapes how they see themselves when they get older.
A few scientific studies have made a particular impression on me. In 2000, psychologists at New York University set up a sloping walkway for babies. They observed mothers with 11-month-old babies and asked them to estimate how steep a slope their babies would try to crawl down, and how steep a slope they would then successfully descend.
The researchers had not initially intended to study gender bias, but the results could not be ignored. The mothers of girls significantly underestimated their crawling ability and bravery, while those with boys had much more faith in their sons’ physical abilities. In reality, there was no difference in the average crawling ability of the boys and girls.
How else are we limiting our children, without even realising it, because of these ingrained and unconscious sexist beliefs?
Another team of psychologists at the universities of New York, Illinois and Princeton assessed children who were told stories including a description of someone who was ‘really, really smart’. The gender of this particularly clever character was never mentioned.
Girls aged six and seven were found to be much more likely to assume that this clever character was a man. In a particularly depressing finding, the researchers reported that girls who saw men as cleverer were starting to avoid activities that they viewed as being for other children.
In December 2020, the Fawcett Society, a charity that campaigns for gender equality, released the findings of a major commission into gender stereotypes in early childhood.
The charity’s review highlighted how academic research has repeatedly shown how gender stereotypes infiltrate parents’ and teachers’ brains and negatively affect how we bring up our children. The report shared evidence that more than one in three girls say they are made to feel that their looks are their most important attribute, contributing to them being unhappy with their bodies.
In their earliest years, boys have been found to be more likely to have problems reading if they have teachers who have traditional attitudes to gender.
The report stated that there is ‘significant research’ showing that failing to challenge gendered stereotypes in childhood makes it more likely that boys go on to be violent towards women and girls.
While writing The Equal Parent, one afternoon I was sitting on the sofa with Solly watching TV. It was an episode of Peppa Pig that involved Mummy Pig and Peppa accidentally turning Daddy Pig’s football kit pink in the laundry, which meant he refused to play in it. We do not have many rules in our house, but Peppa Pig will not be on again any time soon
Of course, watching a bit of Peppa Pig is not going to turn a child into a misogynist pig. But you can see how the messages all around children about what girls and boys should and should not do, say or wear can add up and narrow their ideas about how they should be as an adult, and even who they can be as a parent.
We are trying to show Solly that it can be natural for men to be parents who are nurturing, loving, creative and affectionate, as well as physical and fun. We are also trying to encourage all of the interests Solly starts to show, whatever they are, however supposedly masculine or feminine, and however similar or different to ours.
For the moment, Solly is still a boy who loves playing football in rainbow leggings.