Ljubica Marjanovič Umek, an internationally acclaimed researcher in developmental psychology who was recently awarded Slovenia's top accolade for scientific achievements, the Zois Prize, explores in an op-ed for The Slovenia Times how gender stereotypes have not only persisted but become more entrenched in society.

I remember the 1960s, when I started primary school and spent a lot of time as a child and later as a teenager in backyards and playgrounds between the old apartment blocks in Ljubljana's Šiška borough. The girls and the boys played together most of the time: we rode scooters and bicycles, played hopscotch, Chinese jump rope, round the table, ball games, hide and seek, and cops and robbers, tested the limits of the pendulum swing, sat on benches reading and talking about books and comics that we borrowed from each other, played card games on the stairs, one tap two tap, and marbles, stealing corn and carrots from the fields. And I don't remember anyone dwelling on whether these games and activities are more suitable for boys or girls.

I do however remember that school was not like that. We were assigned to the desks by our teachers: the "diligent" girl, the "restless" boy; reprimands for unacceptable behaviour (including a chalk thrown in your head) were given to boys who disrupted the class; girls were more likely than boys to perform at school functions, boys were more likely to attend sports competitions; we had to wear school uniforms - girls in dresses, boys in blazers. What was going on? It seems that in the 1960s and 1970s, parenting was not so heavily influenced by gender stereotypes and parents were not overly concerned with the typical image of girls and boys and so, probably unconsciously, allowed us to socialise without gendering us. However, in school, where everything was more structured and planned, gender stereotyping was present, both at the level of expectations and behaviour, and in terms of grades.

Later, I was able to directly observe the childhood years at home and in the school environment of two subsequent generations, my daughter's and my granddaughter's. My observations: most parents, despite their constant "apologies" that the pace of life often forces them to raise their children quickly and superficially, are preoccupied with their child's gender and the resulting stereotyped thinking and behaviour from the very first days of the baby's life, sometimes even before his or her birth.

What I mean by that is furnishings for the baby's room, buying clothes, toys and books, but also creating an image of a girl who is kind, emotional, sensitive, empathetic, talkative, and an image of a boy who is strong and brave, physically skilled, emotionally less sensitive, usually a leader and a winner... As a result, parents respond differently to the behaviour and expressions of their girls/boys, encouraging them differently in their development and learning, guiding them in activities of interest and in their education. Parents are greatly influenced by the opinion of their surroundings, and are also successfully "helped" by educational institutions, the media and various screens.

Over the decades, gender stereotypes seem not only to have persisted, but even to have become more entrenched in the face of changing social and technological conditions.

As a developmental psychologist and researcher, the many unsystematic observations have further motivated me to explore the similarities and differences in the development and learning of girls and boys, especially in speech. In a large-scale international comparative study involving almost 13,800 girls and boys aged eight to 30 months from ten non-English-speaking backgrounds, including Slovenia, we found that early differences between girls and boys in gestures, speech understanding, expression and linguistic syntax widened with age, and this was the case in all linguistic backgrounds.

We reasoned that these are robust factors, determined not by different languages but by environmental factors. Over the last ten or fifteen years, several Slovenian studies have looked at environmental factors that either directly or indirectly explain differences in the speech of girls and boys. Some interesting findings from the research: parents rate encouraging children's speech as more important for girls than for boys; when reading together, parents are more likely to engage girls than boys in discussions about what they have read; parents and educators are more likely to encourage girls than boys to engage in imaginative play; at school, teachers rate girls' proficiency in most subjects significantly higher than boys', although external assessment results show that there is little or no difference; differences in reading literacy, as assessed by the international comparative surveys PIRLS and PISA, show that in Slovenia, the differences between girls and boys are wide - in favour of girls.

Environmental factors thus contribute to how the initially small differences in girls' and boys' speech deepen with age. In this context, subjective theories or beliefs held by parents and professionals that it is important for girls to develop speech well are key. Beliefs and associated stereotypes, including gender stereotypes, are slow to change but should be overcome, especially in the interests of fairness and equal opportunities for boys and girls. Speech is a protective factor in children's literacy and, consequently, in their school performance and educational path.