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A dynamic, highly energetic woman I know went directly from college to medical school and without skipping a beat segued into a distinguished pediatrics career in a large city hospital. Her husband, during those years, became a surgeon. Notwithstanding the pressures of training, research, and beginning practice, the couple managed during this hectic period to become the proud parents of three daughters. One afternoon, their youngest daughter Debby, then about four years old, astonished her mother. She had been playing in her room with a little boy when, passing by the bedroom doorway, her mother overheard the following exchange: “Let's play doctor,” suggested the boy. Debby, without a moment's hesitation, replied, “Okay, you be doctor, and I'll be nurse.”
My friend stood transfixed. Here she was, a medical doctor for over a decade, holder of an academic rank and a hospital position fully equal to that of her husband. Equality, not gender bias, had been the watchword in their home; yet, like a dandelion in a well-tended lawn, this atavistic gender stereotype was cropping up. Had she failed as a role model for her daughter? Who or what had nurtured this seed? Baffled, bemused, and bewildered, my friend pondered this instance of bias, as she heard it, in statu nascendi.
However, though a mother cuts a powerful figure with her own daughter, she discovers early, as in this anecdote, that other competing influences are at play. Stereotypes and values in general, as well as tastes, are communicated to her child