Falling in line: Children's gender conformity after feedback signaling gender atypicality

Gender conformity powerfully shapes children's development, yet little experimental work has investigated the antecedents of this conformity. Here, we experimentally tested whether and how threats to children's felt gender typicality-the extent to which they feel typical of their gender group-elicit conformity and whether these effects vary by age and gender. We randomly assigned 147 children ages 5-10 years (70 girls; 79 racial/ethnic minority) to receive feedback suggesting their performance was gender-atypical (threat) or gender-typical (affirmation) on a pair of "gender knowledge games." We then assessed a broad battery of self-report and behavioral measures, which revealed three distinct responses to gender typicality threat: increases in evaluative concern (i.e., worrying about social judgment), typicality-enhancing behaviors (i.e., actively demonstrating gender-typical qualities), and atypicality-avoiding behaviors (i.e., distancing from gender-atypical qualities). Although gender typicality threat heightened children's evaluative concern regardless of their gender or age, only younger girls and older boys enhanced their gender typicality under threat. Moreover, gender typicality threat prompted boys but not girls to engage in atypicality avoidance. These results suggest that although children generally recognize the consequences of gender atypicality, boys become increasingly motivated to demonstrate their masculinity with age, whereas girls become less concerned with proving their femininity. Boys also uniquely learn that avoiding femininity is crucial to performing masculinity, whereas girls may not learn a corresponding masculinity-avoidance norm. These findings inform gender development theory as well as efforts to mitigate the consequences of children's everyday typicality threat experiences (e.g., teasing, bullying). (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).