When Childhood Gender Roles Are Applied to Adults

We all know that gender roles start getting reinforced early in life, and for kids that reinforcement can be pretty blatant. So what if we reinforced gender roles for adults in the same way we do for kids? Buzzfeed is on the case with their new video "Childhood Gender Roles In Adult Life."

In the video we see two new employees at a very strange company. One new hire is a woman, the other a man. And one of their new laptops is blue with sports stickers while the other is pink and covered in princess paraphernalia. Guess who gets which laptop? And things only keep going from there.

It's interesting to note that watching people in the video tell grown adults which coffee mug to choose or that they "can't wear that shirt" is fairly jarring and ridiculous, and yet these are the exact sorts of things we do to children. So it's no wonder that most kids start viewing gender as rigid and absolute – the adults around them reinforce that idea constantly, often without even meaning to. And yet, when you think about it, it's no more inherently ridiculous to do that to adults than it is to kids.

In other words, when you reinforce gender roles for kids, this is more or less what you sound like:

Image: Buzzfeed/Youtube