Social psychologists have shown that adults often overlap race and gender stereotypes, such that Black men are seen as very masculine, and Asian women are seen as very feminine. This leaves other members of the groups such as Black women or Asian men to be relatively "invisible" compared to their prototypical peers.
However, it is an open question whether children also use multiple social categories in categorization and evaluation. To begin answering this question, my research examines whether children psychologically entangle race and gender in their gender categorizations (Lei, Leshin, & Rhodes, in prep). I extend this intersectional framework to examine whether children are biased against specific race x gender targets, or if they treat group membership for categorically. To test this, we adapted the Affective Misattribution Procedure (AMP; Payne et al., 2005) for use with 4-year-olds. Results showed that children showed implicit and explicit bias towards Black boys, but not Black girls (Perszyk*, Lei*, Bodenhausen, Richeson, & Waxman, in press).
Currently, I am extending this work by examining when children might develop a (White) male default, and whether this differs as a function of who they most often have contact with (Lei & Rhodes, in preparation).