"Women are more suitable for cooking and cleaning," says one of the boys. One of the girls is convinced that only men can fly planes. Their classmates agree that girls are more helpful and can paint better, but boys dare more and do not put up with so much.

And the spectator of the ZDF social experiment "No more boys and girls" is amazed how firmly the pink-light blue cerebrum has already sucked in these little heads.

Presenter and actress Collien Ulmen-Fernandes just looks in this calm, balanced pedagogical and recommendable documentation. How much have the second graders, who accompanied them for two weeks, absorbed gender stereotypes and accepted them as incontrovertible? And what would happen if boyhood and girlhood were no longer concreted into the cramped frame of these crooked notions?

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Documentary with Collien Ulmen-Fernandes: Bye, bye gender roles

Their stock-taking does not bring to light any unexpected findings that are unambiguous and therefore dramatic. For example, if the children are to assign everyday activities to men or women, and only 22 percent believe that fathers can take care of their children, and only nine percent trust women to be able to repair broken things.

Gender roles are just imaginations

Where Gendergaudi formats such as Mario Barth's "The Truth about Man and Woman" blar in the face of such statements, and then jump to the next Kindermund-Ulkismus, Ulmen-Fernandes asks: Why, do you think that's it? And could not that be completely different?

She speaks not only with the children, but also with a gender researcher, an educationalist and a brain researcher, prudent experts, and undertakes with their class a gentle confrontation therapy: A ballet dancer, a car mechanic, a pilot and a florist show them in small workshops that her occupations do not know a gender. You can see gleefully dancing boys and interested under the hood peeping girls.

Later, Ulmen-Fernandes lets the children experiment with toys that they would never have touched in their everyday life, for the banal reason that they are being marketed as the opposite sex: sewing machines for the boys, toy cranes for the girls.

It hurts to watch how much shyness or defensiveness these little people first feel, which inhibitions and unfounded obstacles even the youngest are experiencing through social programming. It encourages them to play with the artificially alienated things in the end. Or, as brain researcher Gerald Hüther put it: gender roles are just imaginations - we can let them go.

"No more boys and girls" (both parts), Thursday, 20:15, ZDFneo or in the media library .