<p> From early to middle childhood, girls normatively begin to show a shift towards masculinity. Preschools are filled with "girly girls" whereas elementary schools show a high prevalence of girls self-identifying as tomboys. In contrast, boys' masculinity remains stable without a similar shift towards femininity. One possible explanation for this discrepancy is children's awareness of male prestige. As children become more aware that males are valued over females, I hypothesize that children may be motivated to approach masculinity and possibly avoid femininity. The current study uses archival data and examines whether awareness of male prestige is associated with an approach towards masculinity exhibited by children's gender attitudes. Participants included 217 six-year-old children who were interviewed. As hypothesized, the more that children believed that others had a higher regard for boys compared to girls, the more favorable were their attitudes towards boys, and the less favorable were their attitudes toward girls.</p>

<p> This study investigated middle and late adolescents&rsquo; judgments of and reasoning about an incident of homophobic harassment in four conditions, where the genders of the victim and perpetrator were varied (N = 104). Participants were asked whether they thought the victim in their scenario was upset, as well as whether or not the perpetrator had a negative intention. Social cognitive domain theory served as the framework for coding adolescents&rsquo; reasoning. In addition, adolescents&rsquo; endorsement of gender stereotypes was measured. As expected, having had a male victim, as opposed to a female victim, was related to lesser odds of believing the harassment was completely wrong among tenth graders, and lesser odds of believing the victim was upset. Participants in tenth grade were also more likely to use conventional reasoning in justifying their judgments about harassment than those in twelfth grade. Participants in the male victim/ perpetrator condition were less likely to believe the perpetrator had a negative intention than those in the female victim/ perpetrator condition. Contrary to expectations, endorsement of gender stereotypes was unrelated to the use of conventional reasoning. The effects of endorsement of gender stereotypes and use of moral reasoning in relation to judgments of harassment were significant among participants in the male victim condition, but non-significant among participants in the female victim condition.</p>