Look for female role models and characters, wherever you can. My daughter is dinosaur-mad. The Usborne Big Book of Big Dinosaurs includes little cartoon palaeontologists—and she was delighted some were women. “I like the girl dinosaur scientist!” And then she came out with “When I was a three I wanted to be a princess, but now I am a five I want to be a dinosaur scientist.” I CLAIM VICTORY. (so far.)
I suspect the problem there is that children are natural Platonic essentialists and categorise everything they can. (That big list of cognitive biases? Little kids show all of them, all of the time.) Particularly by gender. “Is that a boy toy or a girl toy?” It really helps that I have her mother (a monster truck pagan who knows everything and can do everything) to point at: “What would mummy think?” So having female examples on hand seems to have helped here. So I have this little girl who likes princesses and trains and My Little Pony and dinosaurs and Hello Kitty and space and is mad for anything pink and plays swordfighting with toy LARP swords. And her very favourite day out is the Natural History Museum.
Look for female role models and characters, wherever you can. My daughter is dinosaur-mad. The Usborne Big Book of Big Dinosaurs includes little cartoon palaeontologists—and she was delighted some were women. “I like the girl dinosaur scientist!” And then she came out with “When I was a three I wanted to be a princess, but now I am a five I want to be a dinosaur scientist.” I CLAIM VICTORY. (so far.)
I suspect the problem there is that children are natural Platonic essentialists and categorise everything they can. (That big list of cognitive biases? Little kids show all of them, all of the time.) Particularly by gender. “Is that a boy toy or a girl toy?” It really helps that I have her mother (a monster truck pagan who knows everything and can do everything) to point at: “What would mummy think?” So having female examples on hand seems to have helped here. So I have this little girl who likes princesses and trains and My Little Pony and dinosaurs and Hello Kitty and space and is mad for anything pink and plays swordfighting with toy LARP swords. And her very favourite day out is the Natural History Museum.
(yeah, bragging about my kid again. You’ll cope.)