Adam Stanaland

And that's probably because the historically male-dominated spaces are just higher status.

So we want to get girls to that high status, but at the same time, we're not sending the message to boys that it's okay to take on a diversity of these kinds of careers and aspirations.

I think so.

And I'm a social psychologist by training, but also do a lot of developmental psychology work because I believe that a lot of the answers to these things have to be when kids are young enough to intervene, right?

By adolescence, by late adolescence or young adulthood, those things are pretty crystallized.

And so it's hard to make as much intervention, although people change a lot in college and stuff.

So that could be another point, an inflection point.

So

Yeah, I think multiple interventions in the lifespan is probably good.

But you're right about this intergenerational transmission.

Yeah, I actually wrote a piece in Scientific American about this and it had four different R's and I can't remember what the four R's now are, but something like resist, restructure the way that they think about things.

So you can say like, oh, they're just pointing out that this is not what they typically see, but it's what, you know, kids can do whatever they want to, whatever they as long as it's enjoyable and safe.

Yeah.

So we were drawing on a lot of the research with adults that has shown that these typicality threats.

So telling someone that they're not a typical man or not a typical woman can have interesting adverse consequences.

So for men, for example, if you tell an adult man, certain adult men, you're not masculine enough, they'll become aggressive to try to reassert their masculinity.

Yeah.

Women demonstrate corresponding responses for femininity.

So we didn't know when this started among children.

We have some research that I've done in the past on adolescent boys, but further down the lifespan, we weren't sure.