The Biden Administration’s Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) has given over $40,000 in federal funding to New York University (NYU) for the sole purpose of carrying out a study on why children allegedly “favor Whiteness and maleness over other identities.”
Fox News reports that the project is formally titled “Societal assumptions regarding typical personhood and their effects on reasoning development.” The study is attempting to discover the exact developmental processes by which children supposedly “acquire the belief that White males represent the default person – a pattern rooted in the ideologies of androcentrism (centering the experiences of men) and ethnocentrism (centering the experiences of White people) prevalent in the United States.”
The details of the project were included in the grant summary on USASpending.gov, which showed the exact amount of $40,391 granted to NYU for the project, which will be carried out over the next three years. It began in February and will conclude in January of 2025.The project description claims, without evidence, that “despite national rises and racial and gender diversity, White men remain vastly overrepresented across a host of domains within the U.S., from media, to politics, to clinical research.”
“Such overrepresentation poses severe costs to the rest of society – women of all races, men of color, and gender-nonconforming individuals,” the project continues, “particularly within the domain of health, where clinical trials have historically prioritized the experiences, perspectives, and health outcomes of White men.”
“Young children actively construct knowledge to make sense of their social environments. As part of this process, children absorb complex streams of information from the sources around them, including parents, peers, and broader societal institutions (e.g. media),” the description dubiously adds. “Thus, the beliefs children acquire tend to reflect the dominant ideologies embedded in their specific cultural contexts: Within the United States, androcentrism and ethnocentrism represent two such ideologies.”
The grant awarded to NYU for this project is part of the broader grant program by the National Institutes of Health (NIH), which is seeking to “enable promising predoctoral students to obtain mentored research training while conducting dissertation research.”
“The purpose of the training grant is to help postdoctoral students gain the research skills needed to eventually become independent researchers,” the NIH said in a statement to the press, before acknowledging the NYU project in particular. “This research will address the developmental trajectory of children’s beliefs that often tend to select Whiteness and maleness over other identities when thinking of who represents a typical person. The research will test whether this belief is established early in development, or if children’s representations of a typical person may first reflect their own-gender biases (i.e., with girls favoring females and boys favoring males) and then may shift in middle-childhood.”