The Development of Intersectional Social Prototypes

Race and gender information overlap to shape adults' representations of social categories. This overlap can lead to the psychological "invisibility" of people whose race and gender identities are perceived to have conflicting stereotypes. In the present research (N = 249), we examined when race begins to bias representations of gender across development. In Study 1, a speeded categorization task revealed that children were slower to categorize Black women as women, relative to their speed of categorizing White and Asian women as women and Black men as men. Children were also more likely to miscategorize Black women as men and less likely to stereotype Black women as feminine. Study 2 replicated these findings and provided evidence of a developmental shift in categorization speed. An omnibus analysis provided a high-powered test of this developmental hypothesis, revealing that target race begins biasing children's gender categorization around age 5 years. Implications for the development of social-category representation are discussed.