Despite the socially enhanced importance of institutional care for young children, gender studies in the context of daycare centers expose significant gaps with regard to the systematic consideration of children under three years of age. The research project provides a contribution to addressing this shortcoming: basic research is conducted in a subject area that has been only rudimentarily investigated, focussing on the social category of gender in connection with additional interdependent differentiations observed in daycare centers. Accordingly, based on the current state of knowledge in gender research, according to which the dimension of gender is linked to various differentiation categories, empirical findings and gender-critical perspectives are being introduced into daycare research and into an expanding field of action where such development has been largely absent to date.

The study looks at all actors, as well as the material environment, enabling extensive, pertinent findings to be gleaned, while offering insights not only into conscious and verbal but also into pre-reflexive and pre-verbal forms of gender relations at the child-child level, adult-child level and adult level in socioculturally heterogeneous contexts. This facilitates the development of extensive empirical jumping-off points for a gender-sensitive improvement of process quality in daycare centers.