Culture and children's reasoning about preferences and gender norms

To examine how children and young adults in two cultures think about gender norms, participants evaluated preferences that were inconsistent with gender norms. Participants (N = 200) included 53 children aged 5 years, 49 children aged 7 years, and 49 children aged 9 years, and 49 young adults from Korea and the United States. Both Koreans and Americans reasoned about violations of gender norms primarily as matters of personal choice in both public and private, with some conventional concerns in public settings. In both cultures, participants rejected the idea that an authority could have jurisdiction over gender-norm-related choices, and both groups suggested that being unable to express those preferences in public has a negative impact on individuals.