Rachel Karpf presented her senior thesis, "That car's a girl!" How children lean to construct gender in progressive preschool, at the 2015 Eastern Sociological Society's Annual Meeting.
Her paper looks at the gender ideologies that are implicit in preschool pedagogies that claim to be gender neutral. While many preschools are now developing practices to encourage gender exploration among their students, in reality these practices are underpinned by old understandings of gender. This paper looks at the theory and practice of two preschools as they try to created a gender neutral classroom. It is also focused on the student's reactions to these pedagogies and how this neutrality impacts their conceptions of gender.