Gender Typing: The Cognitive Developmental Approach

Gender typing is the attainment of behaviors, skills, personality traits, preferences, and self-concepts that are usually correlated with gender. Two approaches explain how gender typing occurs: the cognitive developmental approach and the social learning approach.
The cognitive developmental approach states that children develop gender schemas, or knowledge structures that organize and process information in regard to gender. This approach hypothesizes that the first step in gender typing is labeling oneself and other things as male or female. This approach primarily focuses on gender related thoughts.
The social learning approach theorizes that gender is learned through behavior reinforcement. Behavior followed by positive consequences is