Boys and girls apart

On the left a group of schoolboys from Igberè, Donga (Benin), pose for a photograph and on the right Maya from highland Guatemala do the same. «After the age of three, girls and boys tend to play separately rather than together, particularly when they are in large single-age peer groups. The pulling apart of girls and boys into separate play groups is one of the most striking, well-documented, and culturally universal phenomena of middle childhood», explain Edwards and coauthors in their contribution to the Encyclopedia of Women and Gender: Sex similarities and differences and the impact of society on gender (2001). [Barry Bogin]