The Impact of Surgical Masks on Children’s Gender Classification

• Jenna Loquercio, Psychology, University of Delaware

• Roberta Golinkoff, School of Education, University of Delaware

Facial masking due to COVID-19 affected aspects of interpersonal connection and communication (Mheidly et al., 2020; Chester et al., 2022). We ask whether masking the lower half of the face interferes with children’s ability to classify another’s gender (Brown & Perrett, 1993), and ultimately their development of gender categories (Halim & Ruble, 2010). Mask-wearing may impact children’s ability to identify another’s defined gender due to the occlusion of their face.

Our study explores the impact of masculine, feminine, or androgynous faces on gender classification, and whether children use holistic processing or rely more on certain parts of the face (Fitousi et al., 2021). Fagot and Leinbach (1993) found that 9-month-olds can categorize faces of males and females from pictures. Wild et al. (2000) found that 7-year-olds can classify the gender of adult faces using only internal facial structure. We extend this work to mask-wearing contexts, exploring 3- to 6-year-old’s ability to classify the gender of masked and unmasked faces. We hypothesize that face masks will significantly impact children’s gender classification.

Children were shown images of Caucasian uncovered faces and faces wearing a surgical mask (N=71). The stimuli, borrowed from Ponds et al (2013), varied on a continuum from strongly masculine to strongly feminine faces. Preliminary results suggest that strongly masculine masked faces were correctly perceived 85% of the time, while strongly feminine masked faces were correctly perceived 56% of the time, contradictory to young children’s female face preference (Johnson et al., 2021). Further analyses will be conducted when the data set is complete.